All your karate dates in one calendar

Getting a tournament into your own calendar used to mean copying the date off the page, creating an entry, adding the venue — and starting over for the next tournament. If the organiser moved the start time, yours still showed the old one. And anyone competing at five tournaments a year kept five entries by hand.

The calendar now does that itself — Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook. Set it up once, and from then on it follows whatever changes.

Download or subscribe — the difference matters

On every tournament and seminar page there is the button “Add to calendar”. The dialog offers two ways, and they behave differently:

• Download stores the date once. If a start time moves later on, you hear nothing about it.
• Subscribe makes your calendar follow along. You set the address up once — if the organiser changes something, it changes for you.

For a tournament still weeks away, the subscription is almost always the right choice.

One subscription instead of five — your personal calendar

Instead of a separate subscription per event there is one calendar per person. You find the address in your profile under Athlete → Calendar subscription. It contains:

• everything you have saved — tournaments, seminars, dojos,
• the dojos you are a member of,
• and tournaments you are entered for — without a heart, without ever having opened the page. If your dojo enters you, the date appears; if the entry is withdrawn, it disappears again.

So the heart steers your calendar. Save a tournament and it is in there — on every device, without touching the calendar app. Take the heart away and it is gone. Tidying up happens where you already are.

So that dates from three sources do not turn to mush, every entry carries its origin in the title — the dojo by name, because you can belong to two clubs:

• My dojo: children’s training
• Tournament: German Championship
• Seminar: Whitsun seminar

The calendar reaches three months back and twelve forward. The old single subscriptions remain: whoever wants just one tournament, without half their club life in the calendar, can still have that.

The dojo calendar

Your dojo’s calendar is not public — it can hold internal club dates and non-public training times. You subscribe to it in the members’ area, not on the public dojo page.

The filters at the top of the calendar act on both, the view and the subscription. What you see is what lands in your calendar: Everything, My training times, Where I am a trainer, Events only.

Choose several and they are added together, not intersected: a date appears as soon as it matches one of the filters. For a trainer who still trains, that is exactly the normal case.

Tournaments and seminars your own dojo hosts are in the calendar without any further doing — for everyone, unfiltered. A tournament of your own club also concerns those who do not compete but help with refereeing or setting up.

The federation calendar — two addresses with different scope

For members, the federation’s calendar tab offers “Subscribe to calendar”. It contains all federation dates, its own tournaments and seminars, and the tournaments the federation is invited to. All members may do this, squad athletes included — they see the same dates in the tab anyway.

This address also contains internal dates; it is the members’ area in calendar form.

Public works too: on the federation page there is a box with a fixed address that needs no account. It holds only the federation dates marked public and the published tournaments and seminars — never internal dates, never drafts. Two addresses, because they are two different visibilities; a single one with a switch would be a boundary you can set wrongly.

Your subscription key

So that your calendar gets your dates and not just the framework date, a personal key hangs on the subscription address.

• The key is a secret: whoever knows it sees your dates. Do not pass it on.
• Passed it on by accident? Generate a new key — the old one becomes invalid immediately. Existing subscriptions have to be set up again afterwards.
• Every device can have its own entry. That way, revoking a lost phone does not also cost you the family subscription in Google Calendar.

Two things that would otherwise surprise you

• Cancelled dates do not disappear, they are marked as cancelled. A simply deleted entry would still stand in many calendar programs — and you would be standing in front of a locked door.
• Duplicate entries are possible. If you have saved an event and additionally enter its single subscription, it appears twice: calendar programs keep two separate calendars and do not recognise it as the same date. The subscription dialog says so.

What the calendar does not do

• A saved foreign dojo shows you only what is public anyway. Internal club dates stay with the members — a heart is a wish, not a permission.
• The members’ federation feed requires membership, even if you know the address.
• Nothing that concerns you is hidden. The “matches you” highlight is a help, not a filter — whoever misses an entry because the page kept quiet about it loses more than whoever reads one line too many.