The discussion revolves around implementing a “work hours” flair feature in Discourse to help users indicate their availability, inspired by the holiday calendar plugin. mattdm proposes adding a profile setting for work hours with corresponding 
flair when outside those hours. david suggests using local time display and timezone visualization tools as partial solutions for global awareness. mattdm notes that the upcoming Custom Status feature could support this with scheduling. sam highlights that the existing notification schedule feature already allows users to set when they’re available, with plans to make this visible to others. mattdm acknowledges the distinction between notification preferences and actual availability, and also proposes extending the feature to support one-off scheduling like vacations, though this is a separate idea.
This is inspired by the holiday calendar plugin feature which adds 
flair and a 
decoration to @usernames.
I work in a global community, and with a mix of volunteers who are primarily available evenings and folks who are participating as part of their work day. It’d be nice to be more aware of everyone’s availability.
So the idea: the ability to give “work hours” in one’s profile settings, and then have corresponding 
flair displayed when outside of that time.
A little off topic, but we have a couple of things which might be helpful for the ‘global’ portion of your request. If you enable the display local time in user card site setting, then everyone will get their local time displayed on their user card. For example, on our internal instance, my user card looks like this:
We also use this theme component to help visualize timezone overlaps:
Admittedly, neither of these let people define their own ‘working hours’, so they don’t solve the day/evening part of your suggestion.
So, we’re getting close to this with the new Custom Status feature. It just needs a scheduling feature. 
This feels like you are sort of asking for this existing feature
The plan by @andrei is long term to float the “Z” so other users except for self can see it.
Yeah, letting others see that they’re notifying you but you’re not likely to be around is helpful. (I’m not clear on how this works with email notifications[1] — do they then all get sent when the pause ends?)
Although, for a volunteer community “I want notifications” and “these are my actually available hours” are separate concepts. Maybe okay enough to leave them linked, though. I’ll have to think about articulating this more clearly.
I’d actually also love a way to do longer-term one-off scheduling of things like “On vacation this (future) week”, not just regularly-scheduled hours. Like the vacation calendar that inspired this in the first place, but linked to the status feature – maybe in a way that avoids a lot of all this. But that’s a separate idea from this.
as I don’t use those myself, but it’s important to a lot of my users ↩︎
