Idea: available hours / work hours flair

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

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.

[david (David Taylor)]

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:

Discourse-group-timezones

[22] The discourse-group-timezones theme component can help you display people of a group in a timezone ordered list. It will also show who is in holiday/week-end/out of working hours. This is useful for people using Discourse with a remote and distributed team to work on projects. Usage This plugin relies on the timezone field of a User being set. This field is available at the moment only when using discourse-calendar, so you need to have this plugin to use this component. [wra…

Admittedly, neither of these let people define their own ‘working hours’, so they don’t solve the day/evening part of your suggestion.

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

So, we’re getting close to this with the new Custom Status feature. It just needs a scheduling feature.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

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.

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

@sam

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.

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1. as I don’t use those myself, but it’s important to a lot of my users ↩︎