"Our Commitment To Trust & Safety" guidelines state that Expired Booking is an unattended booking request that is neither declined nor accepted within 48 hours. Which is not exactly true from the point of user experience. Please let me share an example. I've been through a situation when I had an ongoing conversation with a potential mentee trying to clarify whether I'll be a good fit to help them. And for me, as a mentor, there were just two options at that time: Decline or Accept the request. While we were in the conversation, the request is expired, with consequences for my potential mentee to be unable to keep the time slot they wanted to, and for me as a mentor to receive a notice of infrigmenet of the code of conduct.

While the idea of having a strict deadline is undestandable, it unfortunately doesn't fit the complexity of the system ADPList has grown into. Most mentors here are passionate professionals volunteering their time and resources and for many 48 hours might now be enough to accept or decline a request. There may be many solutoins to this problem like, adding an "Extend request" option for a mentor if they are uncertain about thier availability or skills needed for the session, or automatically extend the time of a booking request beyond 24 hours if there's an ongoing messaging conversation between a mentor and a potential mentee. I am sure there are more ways to solve this problem and make the experience more humanist and adaptable to various scenarios.