Improvements to Doorkeeper's Online Event Support

Doorkeeper was created with local in person communities in mind. During COVID-19, organizers have been turning to online events to keep such communities going. Even as the state of emergency has been lifted in Japan, many people have rightly been reluctant to gather in large groups of people. Because of this, we see online events as being complementary to in person ones for the foreseeable future, and have improved Doorkeeper to better support them.

When creating a new event, an organizer now can choose whether it will be held in person or online. When choosing the online option, we now provide you with a field to enter a link to the video conference or webinar. This link will now only be shown to registered participants of your event, making it easy for you to restrict capacity or sell tickets to the event, while avoiding confusion on the participants' part about how to join.

When you indicate an event is an online one, we also no longer show a QR Code or check-in code to participants. While these were convenient ways of tracking who attends your event when it’s in the real world, for virtual events they were just leading to confusion.

Online events are fundamentally different from offline ones, and present a new set of challenges, both for organizers, and us as a platform. We’re also learning best practices as we go along, and so we’d be delighted with any suggestions for improvements you might have.

Changing an existing event to be “Online”

We know that before this change, some of you have been using Doorkeeper to host your online events. All existing Doorkeeper events have been set to have an “In person”, but you can easily change this by editing the event.

However, please be aware that when making this change, we don’t send any notifications to people who have already registered for your event. This normally shouldn’t be an issue, as Doorkeeper automatically schedules a reminder email to go out one day before the event, and this email will contain the link to your video conference or webinar. You can review the status of this reminder via your event’s Messages tab.