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 ↩︎