@anthracite @reasdoinaheckinmeetup @nolan Whatever it does, it should also have a means of getting an ICS that you can subscribe to, or get ICS meeting attachments sent via email or something (which works better for the cross-platform case at least on Apple).
@fluffy @anthracite @nolan That would be the really slick business, wouldn't it? Could allow people to say "remind me (instead) at email@addre.ss". Probably not hard to get an ananas bot sending emails.
@fluffy @anthracite @nolan
There are not one but two python ics libraries; at least one should work. I already have a decent handle on an email library. Do you just send a message with an attached .ics or is it more involved than that?
The other wide-audience feature of meetup is that it's non-self-hosted. Unless we could just acquire some hosting for it.
Actually, side note, I will say that I'm not 100% comfortable running this account on the same box as my other bots; "reliable" it ain't.
@reasdoinaheckinmeetup @anthracite @nolan the ICS format itself is very simple and I believe mail invites are just a MIME attachment with a disposition set although I haven’t looked into it much. I know using a normal file attachment is not sufficient.
@nolan @anthracite @reasdoinaheckinmeetup I was feeling procrastinatey enough to look into this some more. The invitation is sent with the following MIME headers:
Content-Type: text/calendar; method=REQUEST
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=iCal-20171223-024247.ics
Accept/decline/maybe links go to a thing on the CalDAV server itself though, which implies Outlook does something more (and proprietary) under the hood.
@reasdoinaheckinmeetup @anthracite @nolan anyway it looks like at its core it really is just a regular .ics attachment, although that method=REQUEST is interesting to me. But simply having the attachment on the message isn't causing, say, Mail.app to automatically add it to my calendar.
Ugh, I just wish ICS subscriptions were better-implemented on literally any platform I've ever used. Android+Google is the least bad outside of Outlook but it's still bad.
@nolan @anthracite @reasdoinaheckinmeetup of course now I'm wondering how one might go about just adding Facebook-style events (with private ICS feed/CalDAV/whatever for devices to subscribe to) as a first-class citizen to Mastodon. I should go to bed before I find myself learning ruby.
@reasdoinaheckinmeetup @anthracite @nolan Presumably a properly done ICS attachment wouldn't need actual email updates because the calendar event would end up on the recipient's calendar, but Meetup does the belt-and-suspenders approach.
Heck now I just want to make an F/OSS Meetup replacement because, seriously, screw meetup.com