LibraryThing Local revamp without events

This is a heads-up that coming "LT2" update of LibraryThing Local will not include "Events."

The reason is simple: Events get very little action—only two dozen added last month. Unlike most content on LT, events is by nature ephemeral and local, so the incentive for people to spend their time on it was never strong. For a while we parsed feeds from a variety of publishers and one library vendor, and did some rather complicated AI work to separate the "bookish" events from the non-bookish (e.g., Baby Yoga at the Library!). But keeping this up proved a drag on developer time, and we let them lapse. Members have seldom complained. Since we introduced it, people have gotten used to getting their events in Facebook and Twitter.

I still want someone to make a simple calendar of all bookish events near me. Other social media isn't good or reliable for this, at least for me. But making and maintaining that feature a good use of time for LibraryThing's staff or its members.

Comments welcome, but I don't think we'll reverse this.

I will not be sad to see it go. A lot of author pages have "events" that took place years or even a decade ago that look like they are upcoming but are clearly not.

No complaints here. I’ve recorded upcoming events, but I always post a thread about it in the appropriate state or regional group as well.

This makes sense to me.

I tried to add events for a while, but I felt it was of very little use and maintaining it was a drag. Let it go.

So say we all.

I enjoyed them as a place to peruse (and record) historical information far more than using them to be aware of upcoming events. Oh so this author and that author were promoting their books at a joint event? – that type of thing.

Without the auto-feed of the events, the project did seem to fall off a cliff and if it's not being fed with data other than the odd helper here and there, that doesn't seem to merit keeping it on.

This announcement has prompted me that I left a couple of projects half-completed, so I'll go and get those done before the feature is mothballed. Don't take my handful of new submissions as a sign I'm trying to keep it alive! Just would bug me if I left these un-done.

Sadly, I never did figure out a good way to access listings of online events through LT Local, and the pandemic sure did not help the in-person events. I'll be sorry to see it go, but adjusting to how things are used is a plus for all kinds of web sites.

I'd like more ways to add events as venues because I use them a lot in "from where" - "Fair/Festival" is already an option, but there's no way to make it recurring (or just leave off dates) so most of them have bad dates, and it's not quite right for things like the annual NAUW Used Book Sale or whatever anyway.

But "events" as they previously existed were pretty useless and I won't miss them!