"Can I show it to someone first?"
That is how it goes at most clubs: you set up the event, and before it goes live the chair wants a look. Or the treasurer, who wants to check the prices. Or the council, filling in a grant form and wanting to see what exactly is on offer.
Until now there was no decent answer to that. From the outside a draft event only shows "coming soon", so you fell back on screenshots — or worse, you published the event "just for a moment" to show it and took it down again.
Now every draft event has a button: Share preview.
What the recipient sees
The button gives you a link. You forward it — by app, by email, in the group chat your board lives in. Whoever opens it sees the real event page: your text, your poster, your ticket types and prices, the date, the venue with its directions link. Exactly what your audience will see.
With two differences. At the top sits a clear amber banner: "Preview — not published yet". It follows along in compact form while scrolling, so nobody forgets halfway down what they are looking at. And the buy button is switched off, with an explanation next to it.
No account is needed. The link carries an encrypted token; whoever has it may look.
What does not happen
A preview link is deliberately a dead end for everything except looking:
- Not findable. The page carries
noindex, so search engines leave it out. No social preview image is generated and no structured data is included — nothing can accidentally be found or shared that looks like a published event. - Nothing to buy. The buy button is disabled, and the server refuses an order on an unpublished event regardless of what the page shows. Even the clever cannot get in early.
- No noise in your numbers. Visits through a preview link are left out of your visitor statistics. You start clean the moment you publish.
Managing the link
The same dialog holds three things: the link itself (with a copy button), Refresh link and Revoke link.
- Refresh creates a new secret. Every previously shared link stops working immediately — useful when it travelled further than you intended.
- Revoke removes the preview link altogether; the page falls back to "coming soon".
- Publishing leaves the link alone: from that moment it forwards to the real page. Nobody needs a new link.
Copy, open, refresh or revoke — it all sits in one dialog.
All three actions land in your activity log, so you can see later who created, refreshed or revoked a preview link, and when.
Handy for the widget too
Selling tickets through the widget on your own website? On the widget tab of a draft you now see that same preview link instead of a dead reference, so you can check the placement on your site in advance. The embed code carries a note that it will start working once the event is published.
In short
- Every draft has a Share preview button with a link that works without an account.
- The recipient sees the real page with a clear banner and a disabled buy button.
- No indexing, no social preview, no orders, no statistics noise.
- Refresh, revoke or simply publish — the link adapts.
Send it round before the deadline next time. A typo in a ticket price is better heard from your treasurer than from your first ten buyers.
