Frequently Asked Questions

Please remember, your username is not your e-mail address. You chose your username yourself upon creation of your user account. 

You can see your username , when clicking the link in the mail you received after requesting new login data. On the top right of the page you will see "welcome" followed by your username.

Logged in users may edit or delete their own answers.

Anonymous users cannot edit or delete answers.

Appointment creators can delete any appointment entry, e.g. if a user has voted several times by mistake (if, for example, the internet connection has been interrupted).

If the options for appointments need to be extended, a grey icon appears at voting lines. Anonymous users need to add a new line with their votes.

The new appointment can be re-sent to the participating persons. Some programs, e.g. Thunderbird, point out appointment conflicts and allow the update of the appointment.

Yes. When creating a poll, expand the SETTINGS. There you can enable the "Maybe" option.

In a hidden poll, participants cannot see what others have chosen. This can be used, for example, in a larger poll examining possible dates for an event.

Registered users have the option to list and optionally subscribe all pledged dates (menu My Account / Pledged).

Pledged dates are light red, agreed dates are dark red.

To generate a webcal subscription link you need to create an API key first.

Depending on whether or not your own mail service provider uses Greylisting, the delivery of mails can be delayed by a few minutes or up to 1/2 hour.

If the mail does not arrive immediately, just wait a little.

If the address is not valid, the ical (calendar) file cannot be delivered upon completion of the appointment voting. Affected participants may not know anything about the fixed appointment.

Agreed appointments are deleted three months after the fixed date, uncompleted appointments six months after their last editing.

In the case of booking lists, a notice of deletion will be sent to the creator by email after one year of the last processing. This includes a note that the booking list will be deleted after a further 30 day retention period, unless you log in and the booking list is saved again.

Respecting GDPR, these periods are a compromise between service orientation and data economy.

As an appointment creator, you can also delete an appointment by yourself on the "Edit" page below.
You will get to this page

1. if you have a login and are logged in top right at My Account / Votes
2. if you have not registered with Terminplaner, via the link sent by e-mail for subsequent editing

If there is a large number of appointments, as is often the case with bookings for consultation hours or guided tours, the horizontal display of options is only suitable to a limited extent.

There is an extension of Terminplaner especially for bookings. The navigation is vertical (so a large number of options can be easily displayed) and users can make and cancel their bookings without logging in. On the start page, you can choose whether you want to search for ONE appointment or create a booking list.

Details can be found here in the FAQ.

Yes, on tab "View" you will find the area "Copy booking", which allows you to copy the booking to a new, separate booking. Please note that appointments are not changed, and that existing bookings are not cloned. Selected options will not be changed.

Yes, by using "Copy booking". Since dates will not be adapted, you should use a trick: Create a booking as usual, and include the date in the title field:

Enter the appointment options as text:

Select further options and save:

To create a booking for another week, display your bookings and select the original booking:

There you can create a copy of the booking:

This creates a new booking titled "Copy of Office hours Prof. Muster - Week 25. - 31.05.2022". The old booking remains unchanged. Update the title of the newly created booking:

No further changes are needed - just Save.

Yes, just set the date and time in the time window for bookings.

Actual the owner of a booking list cannot make multiple bookings for others. As a workaround, it is therefore suggested to open the link for the booking list in a private window and delete the cookies with Ctrl, Shift and Del. This allows the owner to make multiple bookings for others.

A private window can be opened by right-clicking on the browser icon and selecting open new private window, or via the browser's application menu. In a private window, Terminplaner is displayed as a user who is not logged in.

The key combination Ctrl, Shift and Del works in common browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Firefox or Google Chrome.

Users with a Safari browser can delete the cookies via the settings. To do this, open the browser settings at the top left and select the privacy tab. Then manage website data and click on remove all.

The way via the settings works for all browsers. In Firefox, for example, click on the hamburger menu at the top right, then select settings and privacy & security. Under cookies and website data, the data can be removed or managed.

Alternatively, individual cookies, such as those from Terminplaner, can be selected and deleted by clicking on remove.

The requirement for this is that a booking option can also be booked by several participants.

After the first booking, a cancellation button appears. If additional participants are to be entered for the booking option, for example, one person wants to tegister several participants for a course, you can proceed as described in the previous FAQ.

If the link to the booking list is opened in a private window and the cookies are deleted, a new booking is possible.

Terminplaner has an export function and delivers semikolon based CSV which you can import in Excel or Calc.
If you want to export quickly only a part of the table, simply mark the fieldstable in your web browser and copy and paste it.
Sometimes you are asked for the preferred language of the fields, so just select e.g. English.

The following printer settings should be made:

• Landscape
• Scaling 40% (or less if more than a dozen time columns)
• Deactivate automatic scaling (sometimes wide polls are not recognized, therefore fix scaling)
• Print background images (otherwise the check marks are not displayed)

For lists with more than a dozen options we recommend to use the CSV export feature, import the file in a sheet (Excel, Calc) and format and print it from there.

Both the registration of a user account and entering an e-mail address for polls is optional.

This means that participants in a vote can use it completely anonymously. But we recommend to register, then appointment commitments can be changed at a later date.

However, inviting persons are obliged to provide an e-mail address, so the link for subsequent editing and fixing of the appointment can be received.

It is also necessary to enter an e-mail address for booking lists because this is the only way to send a booking confirmation and information about any cancellations.

In addition, the creation of booking lists with login offers the advantage that an overview of the booking lists is displayed in the account.

Users remain logged in to Terminplaner for 23 days on the same terminal device, unless the browser is set to delete cookies beforehand (e.g. when closing a window). If the Terminplaner cookie has expired or is not present, the session must be reactivated via the edit link, which is sent by e-mail after the vote has been created, or the user must log in to Terminplaner again.

So if the EDIT tab is visible, a registration has been made.

We recommend creating an account with Terminplaner before creating a vote, then the edit link is not needed to enter and all votes will be listed.

For inviting persons, the e-mail address is necessary to send them the link for subsequent editing.

It may be set as mandatory for participants to provide an e-mail address. That way, the fixed appointment will then be sent to this address as an ICAL file so that the appointment can be conveniently imported into the participant's own calendar.

In both cases the address will never be publicly displayed, and will only be used to deliver this information.

Mit dem DFN-Terminplaner stellt der DFN-Verein auf Wunsch der Teilnehmer am Wissenschaftsnetz Nutzern und nicht Einrichtungen selbst ein direktes Hilfsmittel zur Abstimmung von Terminen zu Verfügung. Eine Vereinbarung zur Verarbeitung von Daten im Auftrag mit der Einrichtung ist daher nicht vorgesehen.
 

Invitations directly sent from Terminplaner are limited to 30 E-Mail recipients. If you need to reach more, you have two options:

• Split up recipient list to chunks with less than 30 recipients and send repeatedly
• Use your email  program or web mail to send invitations together with the invite-link

Terminplaner does not send more than 50 emails per hour. This is a measure to prevent spamming.

The difference to appointment coordination is that with booking lists the appointments are fixed in advance and participants can book these appointments. E.g. seminar places, an appointment for a staff meeting, room reservations, ...

For these applications, normal appointment coordination was rather impractical, as the aim is to find a suitable appointment for everyone. It can be defined whether only one or several appointments can be selected for bookings.