Saving, following and how reminders work

Three separate things, and they are worth telling apart.

Save keeps a conference on your list. Follow attaches you to a series rather than to one edition, so when the next year's edition is published you hear about it — useful for a conference that runs annually and whose call opens at an unpredictable time.

Reminders are the third, and they work per date rather than per conference. A conference publishes all of its dates: abstracts due, full papers due, notification, camera-ready, registration opening, early-bird ending, registration closing. You tick the ones you want to hear about. There is no single "remind me about this conference" switch, because the date that matters to you is rarely the date that matters to the person beside you looking at the same listing.

Each date you tick sends at each lead time you chose. The defaults are eight, four and one week ahead for submission dates, and four and one week ahead for registration ones. You can change them; the options run from twelve weeks down to one.

If the organizer moves a date, the reminder moves with it, because the reminder is attached to the date rather than to a moment in your calendar. Whether you are separately told that the date moved is the organizer's decision — that is a different email and they choose to send it.

Conferences that have ended, and conferences that have been cancelled, stop sending. Nothing you saved is removed when that happens; it stays on your list until you take it off.

You will not see a countdown anywhere in this product. Nothing here ticks. Dates are shown as a date beyond eight weeks, as weeks between two and eight, and as days inside a fortnight — and once a date has passed, the listing says so plainly instead of hiding it.