Forgotten Kingdoms Forums

In order to help people remember, schedule, and avoid scheduling over other events, Keltorn set up a handy FK Google Calendar. We've merged this with the AirSet calendar I'd set up, and now invite you all to begin using it:
http://www.rrts.us/fk/calendar/

You can also access it and an ICS feed via
http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/dvl ... /basic.ics
as an XML feed via
http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/dv ... blic/basic

We're still working up additional functionality, but we hope this is a help to everyone. If you would like access to add or edit events yourself, please speak up. Otherwise we will add your events as one of us sees your posting in this forum. If you find this more/less (or just) convenient (at all) [versus the old AirSet calendar], please let us know. This is still in beta.

We can set up links for other timezones/cities, though there may also be a smarter way to accomplish that than to show separate links for each...if you know of one, please share!

Thanks for the stickiness, Lath!

New: You can now access the calendar for a few specific timezones via
http://www.rrts.us/fk/calendar/

You can also bookmark the link to your timezone, and save yourself passing through that page in the future.

Please ask if you would like me to add more timezones, or if I have made a mistake. I don't know much about how timezones work outside the US (I've assumed Dublin and London are the same, for example).

Lathander, probably time for that clean-up of this post. Here are the essentials:

Forgotten Kingdoms maintains a Google Calendar of upcoming events, accessible to the public!

If you use Google Calendar or another ical compatible calendaring system (including...duh...Apple iCal!), add it to your calendar list! The ical URL is
https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/vi ... /basic.ics

If you don't use Google Calendar, you can view it conveniently through this link:
http://rrts.us/fk/calendar/

If you would like an XML feed to it, use
https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/v ... blic/basic

We welcome others willing to help maintain the calendar. Please email or PM me if you have a Google Calendar account and are interested in helping! (include your Google username in the email)

Thanks to Keltorn's player for originating the calendar, and to the several players who help to maintain it (I'd list them, but don't know some of their character names)!

I believe that the built-in Events Calendar is destroying everyone's brain. Apparently a lot of people are missing the bottom where it says "Events shown in time zone: London" and are very confused - example, a lot of USA folks believe the Lady Luck Ball (which starts in a half hour) is actually going to start tomorrow.

The placement of the calander also makes it impossible to click the user control panel options, view personal messages or your posts. It seems to be overlapping. I'd reccomend moving it to the bottom of the page.

It's not really an overlapping problem I think, but that it doesn't automatically resize with one's window. It seems to be set at a fixed size, so if your screen is smaller it will overlap. If your screen is wider, it doesn't. Usually you can set those kinds of things in the web design software.

Also you can only scroll down on it, and not upwards.

The overlapping problem should be fixed with the next forum code update.

For the size and such, well I can't configure it much. The code of the calendar, with all the scrolling and such, is automatically generated by google based on a given size.
Do you think the size is too large or small?

Also, I don't know if people have seen it or not, but a full size of the calendar is available on the calendar page, under the play menu.

El

And the timezone thing? Is there a way to sync it with your user preferences (edit: or at least have it pull from your Google account's preferences)? People are definitely assuming it is synced. I wasn't exaggerating and using some sort of "royal we" to throw the scent off of myself. I must've "tell"-ed a half-dozen people at the event yesterday asking why they weren't at the ball, and heard back "isn't it tomorrow?" from all of them.

Not that I know of, which it too bad
I looked for that already, I will try to look some more too see if a solution exists.

El

I think that pregenerated code that Google Calendar spits out just isn't going to cut it in this case. I went looking through the calendar options as well as problems other people have discussed online, but I don't think that Google calendar users typically need to address so many time zones like we do. As nice as it is having that calendar right there like that (except for people having overlap issues), I don't think it's worth confusing people so badly.

I realize this is a step backwards, but perhaps we could take down the embedded calendar and replace it with a fairly noticeable button? It could lead to the access point that Raona so kindly made for us. It would provide easy access to the calendar as well as address the time zone issue; it just doesn't grab your attention quite like the embedded calendar.

There's got to be a way to get creative and pull the time zone from the user's forum preferences and stick it into the calendar's HTML code, but that one's a bit beyond me.

I will first have a try with a solution I'm thinking about and see if it works

El

What about a separate page for the calender linked from the top?

"Home, Play, Help, Community, Calendar, Builders"

Alright...
So I found a way to make people choose their own timezone for the large calendar in the play section but I can't do that for the calendar in the forum (I can only modify the general layout in html file, I can't add dynamic php content).

What I can do is remove the little preview in the forum, and only keep the large calendar, making it more accessible through a direct link like Harroghty proposed.

Is that good for you?

El

Love it.

changes are up (well you probably noticed...)

El

Let me know when you're satisfied and I'll clean up this thread again.

Hi everyone! This is a bump to inform new players of this handy tool, as well as warn current users of a change:
Because of Google fixing a mistake in their code, folks helping to edit the FK calendar from outside my employers' domain can no longer do so. While I'm not sure how much other people are actually doing this, I want to keep the possibility open going forward. So I've moved the FK calendar from my work Google account to a private one I set up. (I needed to take this step for a few other calendars, too...perhaps just as well, to reduce the mixing of work and personal life.)

What does this mean for you?

If you access the FK Calendar purely through the links at
rrts.us/fk/calendar
then you don't have to do anything - I've just updated them and any bookmarks you have in place should continue to work flawlessly. But if you ever added the FK Calendar (as an ICS link) to a Calendar program you use, it will need to be updated. You'll know this because the whole of 2012 will be filled with a "Calendar Changeover!" event with instructions on what to do! But in essence, all you need to do is forget the old calendar, and add the new one by going to
rrts.us/fk/calendar
and choosing the resulting +Google Calendar link. For those of you outside the Googlesphere, but using and ICS calendar (that's you, Mac users!), the direct ICS link is:
https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/vi ... /basic.ics
XML users, the new link is
https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/v ... blic/basic

Enjoy! Ask here if you've any questions, please (or if you wish to help maintain the calendar).

p.s. Links in the summary post up above have also been updated.

A bump to remind people of this, as well as to add that there is a handy link to the calendar at the top of this page, and every FK website page. Just click on "Calendar" and be sure to set the time zone!

Thanks for the bump, that's precisely what I dimly recalled