Hi,
We discussed this some in the Oslo meeting yesterday[0], and I wanted to send a followup because there wasn't universal support for it.
One of the outcomes of the PTL tips and tricks session in Denver was that courtesy pings like we use in the Oslo meeting are considered bad IRC etiquette. The recommendation was for interested parties to set up custom highlights on the "#startmeeting oslo" (or whichever meeting) command. Also, there is an ics file available on eavesdrop[1] that can be used to import the meeting to your calendaring app of choice. I should note that I don't seem to be able to configure notifications on the imported calendar entry in Google calendar though, so I'm not sure how useful this is as a reminder.
A couple of concerns were raised yesterday. One was that people didn't know how to configure their IRC client to do this. Once you do configure it, there's a testing problem in that you don't get notified of your own messages, so you basically have to wait for the next meeting and hope you got it right. Or pull someone into a private channel and have them send a startmeeting command, which is a hassle. It isn't terribly complicated, but if it isn't tested then it's assumed broken. :-)
The other concern was that this process would have to be done any time someone changes IRC clients, whereas the ping list was a central thing that always applies no matter where you're connecting from.
Anyway, I said I would send an email out for further public discussion, and this is it. I'm interested to hear people's thoughts.
Thanks.
-Ben
0: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/oslo/2019/oslo.2019-05-13-15.00.log.... 1: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/#Oslo_Team_Meeting