[ahmedfromtunis]

Who would want to have their calendar cluttered by random events from the internet?

I have a website where, among other things, people can see a list of a very specific type of events that they might be interested in.

Each event has a button where people can add it to their calendars.

I thought about providing an iCal link, but refrained because I thought it would be frustrating for users to have me put random events next to their private events and appointments.

This might be even more frustrating for users who might not be very tech-savvy enough to properly manage their calendars. Or even have to work with calendars that don't offer enough tools for proper separation of concerns.

Am I overthinking it?

[megaman821]

Calendar subscriptions get put into a different name category. You can hide them or give them a low contrast color. I use it for sporting events and trash collection. I would love it if more companies and services exposed their events as a calendar feed.

[captn3m0]

Definitely overthinking. I personally like having the ability to see "events I'd like to attend" in my calendar. Users who don't like this can decide not to subscribe, or use an alternative calendar app, or learn how to hide/show specific calendars in their existing app.

If you have too many events, than probably creating separate webcal feeds for categories makes sense.

There's even sites that do the opposite - instead of providing a static ICS file for a "single event", they'll provide a webcal feed so that they "update the event" OTA in case anything changes. That is quite annoying tbh.

[jayknight]

It wouldn't be random, but user selected. I have imported calendars for church, daughter's soccer team, some clubs and hobby events, etc.

Some of them I leave disabled unless/until I want to check them specifically, but it's nice to have them right in my calendar instead of having to go to the right page or app to see different schedules.

[sixstringtheory]

In addition to what sibling comments have said, and I know this is a waning concern these days, but having the events in iCal also affords offline use.

[account-5]

I certainly wish it wasn't a waning concern.

[croisillon]

not overthinking, it's a very good argument, i guess it will depend on a lot of things but both options have their plus and minus