Guidelines
This is very much a work in progress. A first draft written by Lionheart 26/01/05. It will be updated when I have more round tuits.
What
The primary objective is to list munches and similar social events. That
does not mean we are biased against clubs, far from it. There is an
excellent calendar for club events on the London Fetish Scene site, so there's little
point in us trying to re-invent the wheel.
Events such as the LFF and BBB are included though. Although they are
commercial, a lot of people attend for social reasons rather than
just to go shopping.
Meetings and things organised by umbrella organisations such as Unfettered
or SM Pride are also welcome.
Where
The rule of thumb is that the event should be within "reasonable
travelling distance" of Docklands. We are not going to try to define just
how long a piece of string reasonable travelling distance is, because it
will vary from person to person.
I'm not going to object if someone adds, say, the Newcastle munch to the
calendar (if you flew from London City you could probably get to Newcastle
and back in a day). But the chances of anyone from the E14 area being
interested in the event are, I suspect, pretty slight.
I'm aware that there are some munches (Norwich springs to mind) that could
make a strong case for being within a reasonable distance of Docklands.
The fact that they are not on the calendar should not be read as meaning
we think they are too far away. It's just that my supply of that special
item, a "round tuit", is a bit depleted at the moment <G>
How to add things
In month (the default) or week view, click on the plus symbol in the top
right corner of the day you want to call up the submission form.
On the first tab, the "brief description" (name of the event) and
"full description" fields should be pretty much self-explanatory. What might not
be immediately obvious is that html can be used in the full description.
Links back to a site or mailing list for the event are actively
encouraged.
Reminders are dealt with below
The scheduling tab lets you set a start and end time if you wish. This
isn't mandatory, but it is a good idea so that people can see in month
view whether it is a daytime or an evening event.
The participants tab can be ignored.
And, finally, the repeat tab lets you set up recurring events to
automatically put the details in every month.
If your event is always on the second Monday of the month then choose
"monthly by day"
as the repeat type. But if your event is always on the last Tuesday of the
month you should choose "monthly by day (from end)".
Once you hit "save" then the event is committed to the database and
visible to everyone. If you need to change anything you will need to contact us.
Reminders
(this section will be subject to further revision because I'm still
tinkering with the code)
Reminders of upcoming events are automatically mailed to our Announce list.
The script that does this runs several times a day (although only one
reminder for each event should ever be sent). I am still experimenting with the best
times to run the script but an overview of how it works might help you
decide what reminder to set if you are adding an entry to the calendar.
Suppose you have an event at 7pm Tuesday and you want a reminder sent out
the day before. The obvious thing to do would be to set the reminder time
on the details tab to exactly one day.
But if the reminders script runs at, say, 5pm Monday it will look at your
event and see that it is 26 hours in the future. Because you asked for a
reminder to be sent out 24 hours before, the script will
NOT send a reminder because it thinks it is too early to do so. And if the
script doesn't run again until, say, 3am the next day then the reminder
you wanted sent out on Monday won't actually get delivered on Tuesday.
Hopefully that should make some sort of sense if you read it slowly. If not,
blame me, I'm a geek <g>.
For the moment (until I come up with a more elegant solution) if your
event starts after noon then I would suggest setting a reminder time of
one day and 12 hours.
Note that a reminder will not be sent out until we have told the database
that the event is "approved". I try to check the calendar at least once a
day, but if you add an event at short notice and want a reminder to go out
then mail us so we can get on the case.
and finally...
a disclaimer...
A lot of work has gone into checking that all the details are as accurate
and up-to-date as possible. But things do change, often at the last
moment. So if you are thinking about visiting somewhere then it would be
very sensible to double-check with the event organiser first.
And if you
do find any errors in the listings please tell us. We can't put
them right unless we know they're wrong.