A chat event is an invitation for regulars and passersby of a chat room to have a focused chat around a topic. The event is used to both announce the start date and time as well the duration.
Any room owner of a chat room can create an event on the Schedule tab of the room:
Once you clicked Add the event is added to the Room Schedule, a message is posted in the room and the event is featured on the Main Chat page:
From that moment on users can register themselves for the event. There is no restriction on who can register. Any logged in user can register for the event, by clicking the Register yourself button next to the event. After a while you'll see for example this for the Happy hour in the Tavern on the Meta:
Users that have registered will receive an inbox notification and email reminder (when enabled) about two hours before the start of the event. Shortly (6 to 8 minutes) before the start of the event every user that is pingable in the room will see a chat popup that the event is about to start.
Depending on the type of event there can be a formal start, for example by the chair of an event. In the SOCVR room meeting events we follow a pre-determined agenda and the meeting is chaired by one of the Room Owners. But the Happy hour on the other hand either happens or it doesn't. It highly depends on who shows up.
There is no notification or visible reminder when an event is about to end. On the Schedule tab of the room you'll see the text currently running and how much time is remaining for the event.
As explained earlier anyone can subscribe for the event and there is nothing special happening in the room settings due to an event being ongoing, anyone can join the room, anyone can talk, registered for the event or not (assuming the room is not in gallery mode). If you want to restrict your audience either create a gallery room specific for the event and then only grant write access to those users that have registered. As an alternative have a room owner kick users out of the room after a warning that you feel disturb the event ...
As there is no guidance on what an event should be or what it should look like it is hard to give an explicit set of rules to follow. For kind of formal meetings rooms can formulate their own guidance like SOCVR did. That guidance is closely related to what the Python room does.
Other rooms have regular events, like The Physics room that just happen.
Each room, its roomowners and regulars are free to suggest events, have them scheduled by an room owner and decide about its form, topic, length and recurrence.
