Can't send reminders after event starts

[richardolsson]

Description

Events in Zetkin (together with the "Zetkin method") can be thought of as having different "phases".

Before the event, you will accept sign-ups and book participants, assign a contact person (one of the participants who accepts certain additional responsibilities) and then finally send out email reminders when you're done. During this phase you might also cancel participants who reach out to you.

As soon as the event starts, you want to be able to record attendance, i.e. enter into Zetkin who showed up already, who has yet to show up, or who cancelled.

The point at which we transition from phase 1 to phase 2 is when the event starts. In the UI, one way that this manifests is in the summary of the "Participants" tab. During phase 1, the summary tells you (among other things) the number of reminders sent and prompts you to send out reminders. In phase 2, it instead shows you the number of attended and no-shows, and prompts you to report attendance.

A user reports that this is problematic for one use case, where they wanted to send out reminders after the event started, because they had late sign-ups that needed the information that is in the reminders.

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to https://app.dev.zetkin.org/organize/1/projects
2. Go into any project or create a new one
3. Create a new event
4. Go into the participants tab
5. Add two participants and assign a contact person
6. Note what the "Participants" summary at the top looks like
7. Go back to the first tab and change the start date to be just before the current time
8. Go back to the participants tab and note what the summary looks like now

Expected Behaviour

In both steps 6 and steps 8, it needs to be possible from the participants tab to "Send reminders". In step 8 it needs to be possible to record attendance, but that should not be possible in step 6.

Actual Behaviour

In step 6 there is a "Send reminders" button, but in step 8 that button has been replaced by the "Record attendance" button.

Screenshots (if you have any)

Before event starts (step 6)

After event starts (step 8)

Proposed solution

I can think of two solutions.

Either we keep the "Participants" UI completely as it is, and add another option to send reminders from somewhere else, e.g. from the ellipsis menu or the "Overview" page.

Or we split phase 2 so that we have three phases in total:

1. Phase 1 is before the event starts. We show notifications numbers in the summary, a call to action to send reminders, and no buttons in the list to record attendance. This is exactly as before.
2. Phase 2 is during the event. We change the UI during this phase to include the attendance buttons in the participants list, but keep the summary as in phase 1, showing notifications numbers and a call to action to send reminders.
3. Phase 3 is after the event. We show attendance numbers and a call to action to report attendance in the summary, and the buttons in the list. This is exactly what phase 2 used to look like.

I'm not sure which one I'm prefer, and would love to discuss it!