I have a website where, among other things, people can see a list of a very specific type of events that they might be interested in.
Each event has a button where people can add it to their calendars.
I thought about providing an iCal link, but refrained because I thought it would be frustrating for users to have me put random events next to their private events and appointments.
This might be even more frustrating for users who might not be very tech-savvy enough to properly manage their calendars. Or even have to work with calendars that don't offer enough tools for proper separation of concerns.
Am I overthinking it?
If you have too many events, than probably creating separate webcal feeds for categories makes sense.
There's even sites that do the opposite - instead of providing a static ICS file for a "single event", they'll provide a webcal feed so that they "update the event" OTA in case anything changes. That is quite annoying tbh.
Some of them I leave disabled unless/until I want to check them specifically, but it's nice to have them right in my calendar instead of having to go to the right page or app to see different schedules.
Imagine we would have had something like RSS for events with Feedly-like services to help us filter out the relevant parts in 2008… I would have travelled the world for concerts
Have the user auth with their google business/teams/Apple account - sync the calendar, make the calendar available via rss.
I've thought a lot about ICS/RSS combinations[0], and my current stance is that while they achieve similar things in some cases, RSS is meant for things that happened in the past (items in the future may or may not show in your client), and calendars are meant for future events. This incompatibility makes it hard to do RSS feeds for events, unless you use event-publication-date, which has its own issues.
I've instead been working on custom calendars for sites I care about.[1] is one such attempt from someone else, but I've been focusing on simpler options[2]
There's also the problem that both Android and Windows are horrible with webcal (iOS/MacOS/Linux work decently well), making "subscribable web calendars" out of reach of most Android users, unless the understand the terrible UX that these platforms offer.
[0]: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/issues/1351
The problem, of course, is that most RSS-consuming tools don't recognise custom namespaces. Still, if you're targeting people who will write their own feed-parsing tools, it can probably work fine.
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