Show nearby events in dashboard events widget in a per country basis

[fernandot]

Hi!
I've noticed that the new events dashboard widget don't show all WordCamps in a country basis. It shows only that ones nearby in kilometres, 400 kms as seen in code (​https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/browser/sites/trunk/api.wordpress.org/public_html/events/1.0/index.php?rev=5559&marks=707,708#L703).
That way, i.e., for an Spanish WordPress user from Madrid (in the geographical center of the Country) it going to be impossible to know about WordCamps in Chiclana (Cádiz) or others far away from that 400 kms standard, and totally impossible for anybody to know about a WordCamp in Las Palmas (Canary Islands), and impossible for anyone that lives in Canary Islands to know about continent WordCamps.
It could be possible to extend/change the range to a country basis (best) or more kilometres?

[fernandot]

Example (strange but true) of the results of the actual system

[iandunn]

If we make a change here, it'll likely be on the API side and wouldn't require any UI changes. I think adding any UI options to customize the range, etc would make it too cluttered and more complicated than necessary (for users and maintainers).

We could add a Core filter and corresponding API request parameter to set a custom range, but I'm not convinced that that's worth the dev/maintenance time required.

A better option would probably be to extend the current range to 450km (or whatever). With that, though, I worry that the signal-to-noise ratio would increase too much for the average user. The farther away the results are, the less relevant they are (in most cases). The less relevant they are, they less likely people are to pay attention to them.

These are some of my thoughts from ​an earlier discussion (comments 1, 2, 8, 9):

[country-based ranges] would work for some countries, but definitely wouldn’t for many others. Countries like Russia, Canada, and Mexico are too large for that to be practical. [So, if we added any kind of logic around countries, it'd have to work differently for differently countries. Given my other concerns, I feel like the extra complexity isn't justified.]

It’s important to keep in mind that the purpose of this widget isn’t to help insiders like us keep track of 100% of the events that we’re interested in; the purpose is to introduce new people to their local WP community. I don’t think the type of user that this was built for is likely to drive more than 4 hours for a WordCamp.

I could be wrong about that, though; do you think the average WP user in [Spain] who has never heard of a WordCamp would drive 5 hours? 6? Keep in mind that, at that distance, they’d probably also need to pay for a hotel room, train/plane ticket, gas, etc.

It’s also not necessarily a bad thing if people don’t see any events within driving distance. When that happens, the widget displays a message encouraging them to organize a local event. [The Community team has historically decided to focus on local events, since those are the most accessible to people.]

I think this is a good discussion to have, and I'd especially like to gather input from people who live in countries where this is a relevant issue (since I'm not personally affected by it, and therefore biased). At the moment, though, it seems like a situation where no solution is 100% perfect, and the pros of a change are outweighed by the cons.

[iandunn]

The corresponding API ticket is ​#meta2998

[Nao]

Here's my thought from a different perspective.

There are quite a few community events in Japan these days. In April 2018, 25 meetups are scheduled as of today: ​http://bit.ly/wpjacalendar

I also would like to show all WordCamps within the country, but am not keen on showing all meetups in Japan that are far away from user's location.

I created ​#meta3592 to suggest showing 5 events instead of 3. In that ticket, I explaind my situtations in details.

[iandunn]

Replying to Nao:

I also would like to show all WordCamps within the country, but am not keen on showing all meetups in Japan that are far away from user's location.

One thing that should help with that is #41112, which pins WordCamps to the widget. That's already been committed to trunk and should be in 5.0.