"Add To Calendar" - .ics iCal attachments for Events in Discourse notification emails?

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I’ve been using the official Calendar and Event plugin for years, and it’s genuinely excellent for many uses - the “Add to Calendar” button in the topic is helpful but doesn’t quite go as far as is needed in 2026.

When a user gets a notification about a new event Topic, they get a standard Discourse notification email. That email has no .ics attachment. This means the recipient has to:

  1. Click in the notification email to Visit Topic
  2. Find and click the “Add to Calendar” button (non obvious, as it’s in the … menu)
  3. Google Calendar users: can click to add from there (opens a new Tab)
  4. Outlook/Apple calendar users: Have to download/open the file manually and add to calendar.

Email clients like Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and Gmail all have first-class support for calendar invites embedded as text/calendar MIME parts. When they detect one, they render a native “Accept / Decline / Maybe” UI directly inside the email - no clicking through to a website required. Not sure if the ‘Accept/Decline’ feedback loop can be implemented so the Topic is updated, but at least automatic addition to the calendar would be something.

This is genuinely a source of friction for using Discourse with some of the teams and communities I support. When something as central as Calendar Invites are natively supported in email clients, people who are new to Discourse find it annoying it isn’t something that Discourse can do.

Just wondering if this is something that’s possible to be added in the future to Discourse Events?

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Have you seen Calendar subscription URLs for external calendar apps ?

Not the same thing, but it has solved my use case of having an always up to date synced Calendar across multiple Discourse instances.

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Yes, it’s a nice option that adds to calendar management.

For me, we might need to add the event link in the synchronization so we can click on it to remember the topic.

It seems we can add other elements to the ICS file, but we might need a tutorial so users can do it themselves :sweat_smile:

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That was included earlier this week

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As they say, great minds think alike :rofl:

Thanks, Falco, and to the entire Discourse team :+1:

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This is a helpful addition and would work for some use-cases. For me, as a person using multiple Discourses and therefore heavily invested in Discourses, I could subscribe to their calendars and have a single up-to-date place where it’s all together.

However, the use-case that prompted the OP feature request was a conversation that initially took place completely on openhealthhub.org via Private Message wherein I arranged a date and time to meet by video call with some potential Wiki contributors (these are not Discourse-invested people who will use the Calendar URL feature), and then we had to fall back to email for the final part - the calendar invite for the call.

It’s low-level friction on the simple stuff, like this, that drives even quite engaged Discourse user communities back to email, Teams/Outlook, and other platforms. Discourse as a work platform would be a great fit but without proper calendar invites it kind of falls flat. As a person who is often trying to pitch Discourse to unbelievers, this is when I can almost hear their brains clanging shut.

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I completely concur with Marcus here - and have seen the same dynamic play out in several communities, especially when involving those who are less deeply in the Discourse ecosystem.

The Calendar subscription URLs for external calendar apps is absolutely brilliant for engaged members of a Discourse site. But it does fall down for those on the edges / outside.

I’ve mucked around with this in the past, and found that I could modify the downloadable .ics to make it behave as @pacharanero desires when emailed as an attachment in a PM. I don’t seem to have collected my thoughts anywhere useful though sorry.

In the first (and achieveable) instance, it would be great to have the existing .ics file (with a few tweaks) easily PM’able.