Booking pages (event types)

An event type is one bookable thing you offer: a 30-minute advising slot, a 90-minute study session, a 15-minute equipment handover. It holds the duration, the location, and the rules, and it is what your booking link points at.

Make one per kind of meeting. You do not make one per person or per date.

Create one

From the dashboard, open Event Types and click New. The minimum you must decide is a title, a URL slug, and a duration; everything else has a sensible default you can change later.

• Title — what the visitor sees, so write it for them. “VR study session — spatial navigation” beats “Study”.
• Slug — the last part of the link, lowercase with dashes. Keep it short and stable: vr-study gives you cal.nuilab.org/u/your-username/vr-study. Changing it later breaks any link you already handed out.
• Description — shown on the booking page. This is where you tell people what to bring, where to meet you, how long it really takes, and anything disqualifying. It accepts Markdown, so you can use a short list.
• Duration — how long the meeting is, in minutes.

Save, and the page is live. The rest of this page covers the settings worth tuning.

Where it happens

Pick the location type and fill in the value. Four kinds are supported:

Whatever you set appears on the booking page and on the calendar invitation, so put the actual room number in it. “Lab” is not enough for a participant who has never been in the building.

Timing rules

These four settings do most of the work of protecting your day.

• Buffer before / after — padding around every booking. Fifteen minutes after a session covers writing notes and sanitizing a headset; the next person cannot book into it.
• Minimum notice — how close to now someone may still book. An hour is fine for a video chat. For anything you have to physically prepare, a day is more realistic.
• Booking horizon — how far ahead the calendar goes, in days. A rolling 30 days keeps people from booking into a semester you haven’t planned yet.
• Slot interval — how far apart slot start times are. It defaults to the duration, which gives back-to-back slots. Set it to 60 on a 45-minute session and every slot starts on the hour.

Approving instead of accepting

Turn on requires confirmation and bookings arrive as pending rather than confirmed. You then approve or decline each one. The slot is held while it waits.

Use it whenever a booking should not be automatic: participants you screen first, requests for expensive equipment, anyone outside the lab. Leave it off for routine office hours, where making people wait is just friction.

Reminders

Set a reminder on the booking page and everyone gets a nudge before the meeting — an hour, four hours, a day, or two days ahead. A day ahead is the sweet spot for a study session: long enough that someone can still tell you they cannot make it, close enough that they have not forgotten.

Limits

• One slot per day — offers only the earliest free slot each day. It spreads bookings across the week rather than letting someone fill your Tuesday.
• Frequency limits — a cap per day, week, month, or year. Three sessions a day is a realistic ceiling for anything that involves setting up hardware.
• Additional guests — whether the person booking can bring others, and how many. Zero is the default. A participant bringing a caregiver or an interpreter is a good reason to allow one or two.
• Notice to cancel and notice to reschedule — how much warning a visitor must give before they can change the booking themselves. Past that point they see your contact details instead of a form, and you handle it.

Presentation

• Calendar view — month, week, or column. Month is the default and suits most things. Column view shows a day at a time and reads well when you have many slots.
• Enabled — the on/off switch. Turning a booking page off hides it and stops new bookings without deleting anything. This is what you want when a study finishes; see Running study sessions .

Which calendars block it

By default your connected calendars block slots on every booking page. You can narrow that per booking page — useful if you keep a separate calendar for something that shouldn’t affect availability. Most people leave it alone.

Rooms and equipment

If the session needs a specific room or a specific headset, and other people book that same thing, ask Francisco to add it as a resource. Attach the resource to the booking page and the system will refuse to offer a slot when that room or device is already spoken for, even if the booking is on somebody else’s page. This is the only mechanism that prevents two studies claiming one lab space.

Editing later

Everything above can be changed after the fact, and changes apply to future bookings rather than rewriting existing ones. The one setting to think twice about is the slug, because printed flyers and emails carrying the old link will stop working.