Calendar subscription URLs for external calendar apps

Feedback after some real live testing:

Background: our Discourse instance is shared between multiple user groups/communities which have their separate permission groups. We have a main category for each of these groups. This categorty is publicly visible and the content is federated into Fediverse (Discourse ActivityPub). It also displays a public calendar. Example (https://forum.netzwissen.de/c/meshcore-str/84):

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The calendar displays events from posts in the main category and also from sub-categories. Event posts in the sub-categories (which are only visible “logged in” with the communities permission group) are not shown on the main calendar for anonymous users (not logged in). Perfect - this is the expected functionality!

I see two requirements which would make the ics calendar link “feature complete”. We use the new ics calendar link to share Events created in Discourse on the public websites of the communities (CMS: WordPress).

  1. events shown in the ics file should be “filterable” by community/permission group. Proposed syntax:
[ics_calendar url="https://discourse.example.com/discourse-post-event/events.ics?user_api_key=[xxxx];group=[discourse_group_id]"]

  1. the ics file should only display events with status “public”. Event status “private” or “standalone” should generally not be published in the ics file. Note: I haven’t tested yet if this is already implemented …