New site feature: Set your vacation / away status (or mood, or whatever)

Discourse has a new feature, where you can set a User Status. It’s available on the user menu, at the top right of the site. Read the details and instructions here:

We used to have a tradition of announcing vacations on the Fedora Calendar — and you can see some folks still do! But it’s kind of an awkward interface (good for its time, not really modern), feels a little heavyweight to do, and is only visible if you go look there.

This is an easy way to set your status (and a little icon — mine is a :cactus: right now, as I am about to leave on a family trip to Tucson, Arizona). You can have it last for a certain time, and if you like, pause notifications while active.

I’m thinking in the future that I will make[1] a bridge that posts these statuses to fedocal — and maybe even does a two-way sync, so you can schedule in advance. It’d be nice for it to show up other places too, like Packager Dashboard — and I have a feature request for Discourse to make it show up on the site about page’s list of admins and moderators.

Of course, this is completely optional — no requirement to disclose your personal life! — but, especially for those of us in Fedora leadership, involved in an active team that collaborates with others, site moderators, etc., etc., it seems like a handy little thing.


  1. or, if anyone is looking for a little holiday coding project… this shouldn’t be too hard. I can provide you with a Discourse API key that can read user statuses. Discourse API docs are https://docs.discourse.org/, and, uh, theoretically https://fedocal.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api.htmli for fedocal, but looks like that needs some work… or reverse engineering. ↩︎

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