Add to your calendar

There are two ways to get Gathin events into your own calendar app. You can add one event at a time, or subscribe once to a feed that keeps every event you are going to up to date.

Add a single event

On the event page, tap the date card (the one with a small + beside its calendar icon). Once you have registered, Add to Calendar on the participation card does the same: a labelled button on an event with a square cover, a calendar icon beside You're going! on the old layout. The Add to Calendar window opens:

• Google Calendar, Outlook and Yahoo Calendar open the service in a new tab with the event details filled in. You only need to confirm.
• Download .ics file saves a standard calendar file. Open it and your default calendar app (Apple Calendar, Outlook, and most others) adds the event.

This adds that one event as a fixed entry. If the organizer later changes the time, the entry you added does not update on its own.

Build your own program

If the event has a published schedule, the window opens as Build your program and lists the schedule's sessions day by day. They all start selected; untick the ones you won't go to. Select all and Deselect all change them all at once. When a day runs in more than one room, each room gets its own coloured dot.

If two sessions you picked overlap, a warning appears at the top of the window. It doesn't stop you; it only lets you know. When you are ready, press the button that counts your picks (Add 3 to calendar, say): the sessions you chose download as one .ics file, each at its scheduled time. If the organizer gave a session a link (a stream, a meeting, a recording), that link goes into the session's calendar entry too.

To add the whole event rather than a program, press Add the whole event instead; the Google, Outlook, Yahoo and .ics options appear. Back to sessions takes you back to the list.

Events that run over several days

An event longer than one sitting doesn't go into your calendar as a single giant block. How it's split depends on how long it runs and whether it has a schedule:

• One sitting: anything up to 24 hours, including an event that crosses midnight, goes in as a single entry.
• An event with a schedule: you get an entry per scheduled day, and that day's hours run from the start of its first actual session to the end of its last.
• A run of consecutive days (up to a week): each day gets an entry at the event's own hours. A three-day conference lands as three entries, not one 72-hour block.
• An event that never stops: if the start and end times of day are identical (Saturday 10:00 to Sunday 10:00, say), we read that as a continuous run and leave it as one block. Hackathons don't pause overnight.

Long events need a schedule

For an event running longer than a week with no schedule, only the opening goes into the calendar, and the real date range is stated in the entry's description.

The reason: a three-month course has a range of 94 days but may only meet on 26 evenings. Only the schedule says which. Without one, writing all 94 days into someone's calendar is more wrong than writing the one day we actually know about.

So if you're organizing a long event, fill in its schedule so attendees can add it to their calendars properly.

The same rules apply to the subscription feed; a three-month course doesn't show you as busy for a quarter.

Subscribe to all your events

If you would rather have every event you join appear in your calendar automatically, subscribe to your personal feed. Open Settings from the avatar menu at the top right; on the Account page, press Add to my calendar under Calendar.

The Add your events to your calendar window opens, with two buttons and a link:

• Apple / default calendar: opens your device's calendar and offers to subscribe to the feed.
• Google Calendar: adds the feed to Google Calendar.
• Feed link: the same subscription address. Take it with Copy and paste it into any calendar app that accepts a calendar URL.

Once subscribed, the events you are going to show up on their own, and the feed refreshes on a schedule. Your calendar app checks it every so often, so changes show up after a short delay, not instantly.

The feed carries your public and unlisted events. Members-only events, drafts and archived events stay off it, because the feed link can end up in places you don't control (a shared calendar, another device); add one of those with its own Add to Calendar button instead.

Keep your feed link private

Your feed link is personal to you: anyone who has it can see the events you are attending. Treat it like a password and do not share or post it. If you only want to share a single event, use that event's own public page instead.