What's new in Tymeslot 1.23 to 1.25: group bookings, hours past midnight and Brazilian Portuguese

Three releases went out in a week, from 1.23 on 8 October to 1.25 on 14 October. Most of the weight is in 1.23: group bookings, availability that can run past midnight, and a new language. 1.24 and 1.25 refine what came before. Here is what changed.

Group bookings

Until now, a time slot on your booking page held one booking. Once someone took it, it was gone. That suits a call with a client. It does not suit a workshop, a class, a webinar or office hours, where the whole point is that several people turn up at the same time.

From 1.23, any meeting type can take group bookings. Switch on "Let multiple people book the same time slot" in the meeting type's settings and set a participant limit, anywhere from 2 to 999. Each slot then stays open until it is full, and everyone booked into it meets together.

Each person books themselves in. They get their own confirmation and their own calendar invite, and they can cancel or reschedule their seat without touching anyone else's. If a meeting type also lets bookers add guests, those guests count towards the limit, so a slot never ends up with more people than you planned for.

Some settings do not fit a shared slot, and the form says so before you save. A group meeting type cannot require payment or approval, and it needs one fixed location: a single video provider, a single saved venue, a phone number you publish, or a custom location. Anything the booker would choose or supply would be decided by the first person to book, for everyone after them.

1.24 adds control over what the booking page says about how full each time is. "Show how full each time is" marks times as "Plenty left", "Filling up" or "Almost full". "Show the count for the last spots" shows an exact number, such as "3 spots left", only once a time is down to the number of spots you choose. One change to note if you set up a group type in 1.23: that release showed the exact count on every time, and from 1.24 it no longer does. Turn on the count for the last spots to bring it back when few remain.

On the managed service, group bookings are part of the Pro plan. Self-hosters have them without restriction.

Availability past midnight

A working day that ends at 02:00 used to be impossible to describe. Availability windows had to finish on the day they started, so evening hours stopped at midnight or were split across two days by hand.

In 1.23, a window can end the next day. Pick an end time marked (+1), say 22:00 to 02:00, and the hours carry on past midnight. Breaks work inside an overnight window too. Meeting types can now last up to 24 hours, up from 8.

The same release splits the buffer around each meeting in two. An availability schedule now has a buffer before and a buffer after, instead of one value for both sides. Existing schedules start with the old value on each side, so nobody's slots move on upgrade.

Tymeslot in Brazilian Portuguese

The booking page, the dashboard and the emails are now available in Brazilian Portuguese, listed as "Português (Brasil)" in the language switcher. That makes eight languages alongside English, German, French, Italian, Ukrainian, Czech and Polish.

Also in 1.23

• The dashboard calendar imports events from an .ics file. Pick the file from the toolbar or drop it on the calendar, see what it holds, then choose a calendar to write it to. The import is a copy, so you can edit the events like any others, and organisers and attendees in the file are dropped so nobody receives an invitation they did not expect.
• Emails switch to a dark design in mail apps set to dark mode, such as Apple Mail. Apps that ignore the setting, including Gmail, keep the light design.
• Booking links can fill in the booker's name and email: add #name=…&email=… to the link. The values sit in the part of the URL that browsers never send to the server, and the page removes them from the address bar once it has read them.
• A long list of fixes for the dashboard on a phone: toolbars and tab strips that fit, titles that no longer get clipped, larger tap targets, and the .ics import button where you can reach it.

1.24: replies, privacy and calendars

• Replying to a booking email now reaches the person you meant. Your guest's reply goes to you, and your reply to your own copy goes to the guest, instead of either landing in the inbox the email was sent from.
• Invitee names, email addresses and messages are anonymised two years after their meeting ends. The meetings stay, so your statistics still count them.
• A subscribed calendar, such as a holiday feed, can count every event as busy. These feeds usually mark their events as free, so until now they never blocked anything. Turn on "Every event busy" for the subscription and they block times on your booking page and in your free/busy feed.
• Repeating Outlook events that start on the 29th, 30th or 31st of the month are refused with an explanation, instead of landing on a different day in shorter months.

1.25: reminders for meetings you add yourself

When you added a meeting from the dashboard calendar, it went out with no reminder emails at all. In 1.25 you choose them as you create it, up to three per meeting, the same way you would on a meeting type. The guest and anyone else invited receive them.

The booking page also now refuses a paid booking up front when the host's plan no longer includes payments, instead of letting the booker get as far as checkout before it fails.

Self-hosting: back up before 1.23

1.23 changes the database to hold group bookings and overnight hours, and the images from before it cannot read them. Back up before you upgrade. If you need to undo the upgrade, restore that backup; do not go back to the previous image.

The full list is on the changelog. As always, tell us what you want next.