Upcoming.org
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Upcoming.org is a social event sharing silo. It was acquired and shutdown by Yahoo, and later recreated by its original founder at its original domain name. The current version is open source on github at https://github.com/upcoming/upcoming-www.
Why
You should POSSE your event posts to Upcoming.org because it has a good community.
How to
How to POSSE
How to POSSE to Upcoming:
- currently: manually enter your event info into: https://upcoming.org/event/add
Perhaps in the future:
Return of Upcoming
- The Kickstarter project: The Return of Upcoming.org
- The GitHub organisation: upcoming
- Full source of the new site: upcoming/upcoming-www
On March 23, 2017, a backer-only update called One Week was published by Andy Baio announcing Upcoming’s public launch exactly a week later: March 30, 2017.
On March 31, 2017, a public update called Upcoming Is Back was published by Andy Baio marking its definitive return and launch:
In September 2003, I opened Upcoming.org to the public. And now, 4,941 days later, four years after Yahoo shut it down and deleted everything, Upcoming.org is back — thanks to you. Go try it out, and feel free to spread the word
Brainstorming
What's the best approach to take with Upcoming.org beyond just asking them to be indieweb friendly?
- Enable rsvp to IndieWeb events for users with no IndieWeb-sites – thus creating a natural fallback action that can be used in Webactions
- Make it possible to follow IndieWeb users/sources through the "follow" functionality of Upcoming
- Be able to submit events to Upcoming.org like one can do to IndieNews – using Webmention and u-category. Either have it just submit in general or perhaps also to specific tags by adding specific Upcoming.org tag URL:s
- Allow for IndieWeb rsvp to Upcoming.org events and have Webactions on Upcoming.org to make them easier and/or allow creating an IndieWeb rsvp on ones own site over Micropub, or PESOS:ing one. Same for eg. favorite and other interactions that may be supported
- Ability to check people as attended after the event for statistics after the fact
Using Upcoming for IndieWeb Events
We've had some discussion about creating a separate events site for IndieWeb events outside of the wiki, which could solve some of the challenges of using our wiki to maintain events lists. Below is a list of what about the Upcoming software would need to change to be able to support our use cases.
Requirements
These features must be in Upcoming in order for it to match our use cases. In other words, without these, there is no reason to start using Upcoming.
- Allow events to be editable by anyone, while hiding or de-emphasizing the person who created the event. (Currently Upcoming events look like they are "owned" by the person who creates them.)
- IndieAuth sign-in. Currently the only authentication mechanism is Twitter.
- ...
Good Ideas
Things that would make Upcoming a significant improvement over our current solution, but can wait until after an initial launch.
- Clone/duplicate events
- Sub-events. e.g. each city's HWC could be linked as a sub-event of the main "HWC April 11th" event.
- Upcoming events should support receiving Webmention and accepting and showing indie RSVP responses. (Not required since our current wiki does not support this either.)
- Show Webmention comments
- Show photos received via Webmention comments
- Upload photos to events afterwards
- ...
Complete Solution
The features below would mean Upcoming would be the only solution we would need for events.
- Have some from of ticketing,
- Registering for free tickets, without first signing in with your website
- Handling payment for Indie Web Summit ticket sales
- ...
2013 Site Death
2013-04-30 Upcoming was shut down by parent company Yahoo, one of many 2013 site deaths, redirecting all upcoming.yahoo.com URLs to the yahoo.com home page.
Domain Return and Archive Links
In 2014, Yahoo sold the original Upcoming.org domain name back to found Andy Baio who set it up with a Kickstarter (successfully funded), and started linking old upcoming.org event and user profile URLs to Archive.org copies.
This saga is documented in Andy Baio's post on Medium:
Example URLs with archive.org links on their new upcoming.org 404 pages:
Some Upcoming events lack archive.org links, perhaps because they were created after Upcoming became a subdomain of Yahoo.com:
- http://upcoming.org/event/4521748/
- This Upcoming event was a syndication of the original event page at microformats.org, a manual POSSE of sorts:
- http://microformats.org/wiki/events/2009-09-23-weekly-dinner-sf
As Baio rebuilds and redeploys Upcoming.org, it's likely that all the above Upcoming.org URLs will all work directly to serve their old content (i.e. without requiring clicking through to an archive.org page).