Many calendar events point to defunct user groups

[inxilpro]

I was just looking at the official PHP events calendar and it seems like the vast majority of events listed are for groups that no longer exist. I reviewed the first 7 days of the November 2024 calendar, and only 5 of the 27 events listed are actually active:

• Page/domain not found: 14
• Link works + event still exists: 5
• Meetup exists but PHP calendar is broken: 1
• Last meetup > 5 years ago: 3
• Last meetup > 2 years ago: 1
• Ads for training: 3

I'd be happy to help. I can potentially PR a script that could at least check that event links resolve. I'd also be happy to manually review existing recurring events and remove the ones that no longer exist.

Let me know if you'd be open to accepting a PR for some automated clean up, and maybe point me in the direction of how I might apply for some sort of moderation access to the calendar?

Thanks for all the hard work the existing php.net volunteers put into to keeping the site updated and working!

[heiglandreas]

There us a list of PHP usergroups at https://php.ug.

That List once was also renxered on php.net.

That list does include the events that the listed usergroups publish via an ICS file (meetup dies that out of the box).

The main issue is as always keeping the list of usergrouls up to date. I am doing my best but help from others is much appreciated. I wrote a script that checks regularily for inactive groups but it might miss some.

The events from the usergrouls are also exported as ICS file from php.ug

Would that be helpful?

[inxilpro]

@heiglandreas I've been meaning to reach out to you, because I want to figure out how phpx.world and php.ug can collaborate! I'm building PHP× as a way for groups to host a simple homepage and handle announment lists/event rsvps/etc easily. In an ideal world, maybe we can set it up so that PHP× events are automatically added to php.ug?

Either way, I would love to see the events calendar on php.net get cleaned up. I did a little digging today, and it seems like new events get inserted into a db and then emailed to the php-webmaster@ email address for approval. Then, approved events are written periodically to a CSV file that's read by cal.php.

We might be able to modernize that system a bit and make it a little easier for folks to manage/keep up to date. I'm happy to work on a PR, but I'd love to get a thumbs-up from someone who has the ability to merge PR's so that I don't spend a couple weeks on something that isn't the direction y'all want to go…

[heiglandreas]

Collaboration is fairly easy 😉 We add each group on PHPx to PHP.ug and add a link to their respective ICS file. Then PHP.ug will fetch that ICS file on a daily basis and add the events to it's internal event-cache. I created an issue for that on PHP.ug

Let's continue the collaboration part there.

[heiglandreas]

The main problem with the entries in the DB is that they are recurring events that will continue forever. So someone does need to clean up the database.

I have neither the power to do that or to merge PRs here. But I am sure @derickr or @cmb69 can help with stuff like that

[jimwins]

The interface for managing the events is at https://main.php.net/manage/event.php, so the code for that lives in the web-master repo. I'm happy to review PRs or remove events if someone just wants to provide a list of dead ones.

ug-admins@lists.php.net can also be a place where this is coordinated. https://news-web.php.net/ug.admins

[inxilpro]

@jimwins would it be possible to get a copy of the csv or a dump of the database? That would make my life a lot easier…

[heiglandreas]

@jimwins That list is kinda dead for quite some years now. As I was the last one writing to the list in.... 2019? ... I'm rather confident of that. Not.happy with it but that is a different story....

[jimwins]

https://www.php.net/backend/events.csv

[jimwins]

@heiglandreas Sure, the list is kind of dead (and was half-dead in the configuration until recently), but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. I'm just saying if that people want to revive the PHP UG space, it's a still-open list that could be used for coordination.

[heiglandreas]

You are kinda preaching to the choire 😁

But by now the concept of Mailinglists is about as well understood as IRC. It's awesome but people new (and old) to the space seem not to want to use it. Especially when there are channels on the PHPc discord. Also the mailinglist so far was always only a very small subset of UG administrators. For whatever reasons they like to separate themselves from others. 🤷

Yes! We can revive the mailinglist!

Also: We should add other cgannels of communication on the wiki-page and make getting to the wiki page easier.