well its not as bad as a couple years ago when they decided to make all announcements on Reddit and Twitter and not here .. that did not turn out so well.
Hey, is this the much ado about nothing crowd? Oh, where do I take a seat? And my commemorative fedora?
Thanks for the heads up on this! We've posted the patch notes for Dec 14th 2017. You can find the calendar in game by using the /calendar command or EQ->Alerts->Event Calendar Or you can bind a keypress to open the calendar in the UI category of the Keys tab in Options. Event alerts should disappear when the event has ended as of the April 20, 2016 update. - Alerts associated to events will now disappear when the event has ended. This appears to work correctly on my client. The strings displayed in the alert cannot show the date and time details of an event as these strings are static while the event dates and times shift globally depending on the year's actual calendar and shift locally depending on your time zone.
I can login from a computer I haven't used for a given character in a year or so and get alerts that are over a year old (I think I've had some from the original batch of alerts). It's annoying having to click 20 plus things to get the alerts icons to clear away. Personally, I never read those things. I find the whole window of little icons I cannot remove from my UI to be annoying rather than useful. I know others like it. A great solution would be to allow us to hide the window so we can blissfully ignore it if we so choose. The introduction of the Calendar seems like a better solution that should allow the alerts UI to be less draconian in its presence.
You can make that window very small (too small for even one of the icons), and drag it to a least-used corner of you UI, that might help.
This is not working on any of my clients, I really notice this on characters I have not logged in for a while, they will display alerts for any event that had occurred since last time I logged them in, even it they finished months ago.
If I might make a suggestion for future /calendar showings. If an event is set to turn off at 2am, don't list it in the days' bonuses.