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Last night I posted a new blog post and created the corresponding community event. It shows up correctly on meta:

events on meta

However, the new event is missing on main:

events on main

Note: Since posting this question, the events have changed -- the Brutal Builder is now the "old" one that shows up everywhere, and there's a new one, The Tools of Battle, that appears only on meta. We're getting one event on main but two on meta.

The same thing happened when I created the event for the previous blog post on Saturday night. Before that, events showed up correctly. We generally show two recent blog posts.

On main the slot is instead given to a "hot" meta question, but those are only supposed to be used to fill in if there's nothing more important to show in the box. Community events are supposed to trump that.

This isn't a problem on all sites. Look at the Community Bulletin from Mi Yodeya (main site):

Mi Yodeya

Two community events! It's working for them but not for us.

How do we get our events to show correctly on main? The whole point of the events is to publicize things to the many users who don't come to meta.

I've tried un-featuring some meta posts here, thinking those were pushing out events even though events should "win". It didn't help; now we get plain old non-featured meta posts, but not both of our blog-post events.

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  • $\begingroup$ I seem to see it on main? i.imgur.com/JE12O3P.png $\endgroup$
    – Seth
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 18:49
  • $\begingroup$ @Seth and do you see two events on meta? That's the problem -- two exist, but only one is being shown on main. $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio Mod
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 19:03
  • $\begingroup$ Ah, I misunderstood. No, I only see the one on main. $\endgroup$
    – Seth
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 19:08
  • $\begingroup$ @Seth sorry about that; I had lost track of the fact that the screen shots in the post are now out of date with current events. (I added a note about that; if I retake the screen shots they'll just be wrong again in another few days.) $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio Mod
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 19:13

2 Answers 2

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Took me a while to find this, since the normal criteria would dictate that both events are shown.

Turns out, there's a bit of logic that runs to add meta posts that are featured network-wide - that is, posts on Meta Stack Exchange tagged "featured". Part of the logic involved in that "de-duplicates" the list - I'll spare you the details, but the gist is that normally we try to prevent the same post from appearing in multiple "sections" while building the list, but since we're tacking on additional items at the last moment we have to do it again (imagine a case where a MSE question was featured and also listed in an event on a different site - you'd want the event listed, but not the featured post. This might not be an entirely hypothetical scenario.).

Well... Both of your events have the same question associated with them, so one of them gets discarded - but only if the MSE merge logic runs. Since that doesn't happen on meta, both events show up here.

I'm leaving this tagged as a bug, since presumably the behavior should at least be consistent. As a workaround for the moment, just point one of the events at a different post - I went ahead and pointed the "Brutal Builder" entry at the "previous blog posts" answer, and immediately both events appeared.

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  • $\begingroup$ Ah, thanks! I always use the verbose form of the URL, the one including the question title, in events, because when I started doing this a part of me wondered if two events could have the same URL. But I guess you're resolving those URLs to just the question # first and then de-duping. Since we'll only have two at a time your solution works (and I'll do that until the bug gets fixed). It'd still be good if they can fix the bug, 'cause that'll be less bookkeeping for us. $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio Mod
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 19:37
  • $\begingroup$ For URLs that point to a question or answer, the "canonical" ID will be the PostId. For all other URLs, it'll be the URL combined with the title of the event. There are thus more elaborate workarounds possible, but I wouldn't advice spending too much effort on this. $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 19:43
  • $\begingroup$ @MonicaCellio Just a heads up, looking into this bug. $\endgroup$
    – Michael Stum Staff
    Commented Mar 8, 2017 at 0:19
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    $\begingroup$ Thanks @MichaelStum! In case this helps, we've been updating this meta post and creating events (with two active at a time) for a couple months now, and the second one only started getting removed recently. I think the event for "Medieval Warfare" was the first one that didn't show up when expected; I posted this bug report when it happened a second time. $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio Mod
    Commented Mar 8, 2017 at 0:40
  • $\begingroup$ Related bug: worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5713/28 (when bumping events on main, it's bumping the wrong one). $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio Mod
    Commented Dec 22, 2017 at 18:35
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Just a heads up on how I think this should work:

We have 4 different sections:

  1. Upcoming Events
  2. Blog
  3. Featured on Meta
  4. Hot on Meta

If a Link is in multiple sections, we discarded all but one of them (de-duplication) but ONLY if there are Meta Posts pulled in. So Meta and Main behave differently.

The new idea would be to:

  1. Always keep all Community Events
  2. De-dup them from the other sections (so if a link is in both "Featured on Meta" and "Upcoming Events", we discard the "Featured on Meta" one)
  3. Make the logic consistent between Meta and Main

Does that sound correct to you?

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  • $\begingroup$ That sounds right to me, thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2017 at 17:53

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