Empty published calendars

[nakal]

It seems there are some calendar providers that publish empty ics resources (0 bytes on HTTP download) instead of publishing an empty set of events and keeping the calendar metadata.

This leads to errors and notifications that appear daily ("Couldn't parse iCalendar").

Is it possible to work around this somehow?

[sunkup]

Definetly! Not in the near future, but if it's an actual problem we should address it. Do you have examples? And why would you subscribe to empty calendars?

If the use case is sensible we could add it to the development backlog :)

[nakal]

Haha. They weren't empty when I subscribed. These calendars are published for the events in the city where I live.

I think they are still valid/available, because the website mentions the URLs. Maybe the PHP-based generator scripts are not implemented very well.

Honestly, I think this is their error. I've been thinking if I should report to them. It's mostly a pain to discuss bugs with city officials.

Example:
https://www.werne.de/de/veranstaltungen/kalender-abonnement/

Click on "Feste und Events". There is the official URL for the calendar. Try curl and you'll see the empty page after resolving the redirection.