Apologies in advance if there is an obvious answer for this - but any suggestions from finding which providers will be in town on a given day or days, other than painfully going through pages of posts on the board one by one?

Some providers are kind enough to post their dates right in the subject (many don't), and the result for me is that if I know I will be in town on day X, I spend a lot of wasted time reading through a few hundred or a messages to find the overlap. Many providers post their dates in far advance, others post them mid visit. So you may need to look back 4 weeks to find posts about this week, etc.

Is there a reliable calendar where you can pick date(s) and simply see who will be there without all the other non relevant noise? For those who feel spending hours on the board searching is fine - I envy your free time and/or patience, but that's not my ideal.

Peace

For all touring ads.  

There isn't any calendar that I know of, but if there was, that would be amazing.

END OF MESSAGE

If a provider posts an ad on the NYC board and she is not NYC based, usually the mods will "not allow" the post until she puts the dates of visit in the subject line.  

What you're suggesting is a great idea, but I don't believe there is currently a search feature on the board currently. Perhaps post it in the suggestion forum as well?

The only other work around I can suggest is P411- my understanding is that listings there will show the visiting provider's "schedule" which will say the dates they are visiting, "flexible", or "by request only"

For the same reasons, someone keeps suggesting that TER should add a calendar feature to keep track of schedules for a fixed window of time.  There is discussion there about how to get it to work. (Voluntary posting to the calendar? 10-day preview? 30-day preview? Editing listings?)
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The aim of the OP was to more easily find "Available Today" kinds of information.

Calendars are annoying IMHO. I'm too busy looking and following my own, yet alone everyone else's. Quick, legible and to the point is what I'm looking for from visiting providers. Subject line dates are extremely helpful.