I use Google Calendar quite extensively, as it has many decent capabilities, is easily shareable, and operates nearly seamlessly across multiple systems and multiple platforms. In addition to creating entries for events that I know I'm going to attend, I also create entries for events I might attend or would like to attend. I want the people I share my calendar with to know which events I'm committed to going to and which I merely might attend and that can easily be supplanted with more important events. In other words I'd like to see a new feature added to Google Calendars: the ability to share both calendar events AND my availability; currently I can share one or the other, but not both.

So last July I searched the Google Calendar Help Forum and found this thread, which seemed like the best place to post my request, which I did.

The thread had been started in March as a renewal of "the discussion requesting the ability to set a Google Calendar default for Busy/Available for new calendar events" (another closely related feature I'd like to see). The next day one "KaileyK" responded,

Thank you for sharing your opinion with us here in our Calendar forum today, much appreciated. I can certainly see how this feature request makes sense, especially given your detailed example. I can surely note this down to share with my team. Again, thanks for the feedback and wishing you well.

Then in June, after four more posts by users, she added,

Thank you so much for all of your support for this request! I have made a note of this and plan to share this very soon!

As of today, there have been 46 posts by 43 different authors—most of them supporting this change, the others asking for a status update—without a single word from KaileyK, who has 2,772 posts in the Google Calendar Help Forum, or anyone else purporting to have anything to do with Google.

But it's worse than that. Note that the original post was to renew a prior discussion. There's a short thread from 2009 with the same request and another with 62 posts—many expressing frustration at the lack of response by Google—by 58 authors that started in April 2009. So users have been requesting something like this feature for almost six years!  In September, I added another post to the latest thread on the topic:

I can't help wondering if anything posted here has any effect at all at on what Google actually does. Maybe it's a just a place for us to vent....

It certainly doesn't appear that Google is paying any attention to these forums. If they were, I'd have thought they'd at least say they have no plans to implement such a capability. Instead, the silence has been pretty much deafening.