Private events

Not every event wants to be on the home page. Swirl has first-class support for private (invite-only) events — they exist on the platform, but only people with the link can see them.

How to make an event private

Two paths:

• At post time — in the web form, the Visibility field has Public (default) and Invite-only. Pick the latter.
• After publishing — from your dashboard, tap the event and use the visibility toggle to flip from Public to Private.

The moment you flip a published event to private, two things happen:

1. We generate a share link that looks like swirl.events/i/<random-token>/.
2. The event disappears from search, the home page, category pages, and your public host profile. The event detail page (the /events/<slug>/ URL) starts returning 404.

The share link is now the only way to reach the event.

Sharing the link

Copy the share link from your dashboard and send it however you like — text, group chat, email, calendar invite. Anyone with the link can see the event and RSVP, just like a public event.

There’s no email or phone allowlist today — the link itself is the credential. Anyone you give it to can open it; anyone they forward it to can also open it.

Rotating the link

If the link gets out further than you wanted, hit Rotate share link in the dashboard. We:

• Generate a new token (/i/<new-token>/).
• Revoke the old one — anyone hitting the old URL gets a 404.

You’ll need to re-share the new link with everyone who’s supposed to have access.

What attendees see

A private event page looks almost identical to a public one — same hero, same RSVP form, same description. Two small differences:

• A coral accent stripe at the top and “An invitation from <your name>” instead of the usual series / host chips.
• A noindex meta tag, so search engines don’t crawl it. (Both private events and our static site’s robots.txt keep /i/ out of search results.)

RSVPs work the same. Anyone with the link can RSVP without an account, same as a public event.

Who can see what

Surface	Public event	Private event
Home page rails	Yes	No
Search & browse	Yes	No
Your public host profile	Yes	No
Series page (if attached)	Yes	No
Venue page	Yes	No
Sitemap	Yes	No
Direct URL	/events/<slug>/	/i/<token>/ only

Note

What’s not built yet: per-invitee tokens (so you can tell who’s used which link), email / phone allowlists, and revoking access for individual people. The current model is “anyone with the link”. If you need stricter control, lean on series memberships at /manage/series/<id>/ — those track individuals.