WhatsApp is introducing a couple of new features for Communities that will allow members to participate in newer ways. Meta, the parent company of the instant messaging platform, announced on Wednesday that it is adding a new Events feature and allowing replies in the Announcement Groups to make Communities more interactive. Events will allow members of a group to create any event and other participants can then add if they're going or not. Notably, WhatsApp is also reported to be working on a Recently Online feature that will list users who have logged into the app recently.
Announcing the features in a newsroom post, Meta said, “To help bring communities even closer together, we're adding a new way for people to organize events on WhatsApp, and we're introducing organized replies in Announcement Groups so members can respond to important updates from admins.” As per the company, Events can now be created by any group member whose group is part of a community. The option to create an event can be found by tapping the paper clip icon in the text field which also opens options for polls and payments.
These events can be for anything including a virtual meet-up or a birthday party. Once an event is created, other members can respond to it. They can open the event and confirm whether they will be attending it or not. Everyone can see who will be attending the event and who will not be.
The events can also be found on the group's information page. Members who will be attending will get a notification when the event is close to remind them about it. For now, Events are exclusive to groups in Communities, but WhatsApp has said that it will be rolling out the feature to all groups over the coming months.
Another feature being introduced is replies to Announcement Groups. Every community in WhatsApp has a separate Announcements group which is accessible to all members even if they are added to just one of the groups but only the admins can post in it. It is normally used to post major announcements that are relevant to all members. WhatsApp is now allowing all members to reply to these messages.
This feature is designed to let admins get feedback from the community in a single space. These replies are grouped and minimised to avoid cluttering, and opening it opens a bottom slide that shows all the replies. Reply notifications are muted for everyone.
