3.11.1 Not importing Venue

Hey Douglas,

I’m really, really sorry to recommend yet another code installation after you just went through updating your Release Candidates – but our official releases for all of these plugins were launched earlier today.

These official releases do have some more code than the Release Candidates, so I’d recommend getting up to speed with the “official release” first.

Again – really sorry to send you back to the Update screens after all this! But hopeful that our improved codebase can be helpful here.

If you’re able to get up-to-date with the current releases let me know! And let me know if anything is noticeably improved.

Cheers!
George

Douglas
I’ve found that many venues (and organizers) won’t be imported if their FB page setting are age restricted. To test go to the FB page you’re having a problem with while logged into FB. Copy the url and try to go to the same page while you are logged out of FB. I typically just use a second browser because I’m to lazy to keep logging in/out.

If while logged out you get a “Sorry, this page isn’t available” message it means there are age restrictions on that page.

Ok… After further research and testing, I have found that the venues that are not importing are apparently age or country restricted on Facebook.

After speaking with a couple of Venues about why they are restricted on Facebook, I am being told that when they tried advertise or boost posts on Facebook they were told they had to restrict the venues page for alcohol in order to get their campaign approved.

There appears to be some inconsistency with Facebooks enforcement of this policy.

I guess, what ultimately comes down to, is can we setup our Facebook app used by the plugin to login or qualify to retrieve age restricted data? Or/and does the plugin and graph api even have the ability to some how get data that requires that type of access.

If you add the venues page id to the Facebook IDS that you want the plugin to automatically retrieve events for you will get the API error displayed when you try to load the import Facebook screen to validate the restriction.

The plugin apparently either does not respond to or The API does not raise an error when the venue is not accessible vs not available.

It would appear to me that this could be a big issue for users of this plugin going forward, both to figure out what the issue is as well as limiting the functionality of the product.

Side note…. If there is a way to access the graph api and validate age restrictions events created by any age restricted pages could also be imported and increase the successful functionality of the plugin in other situations as well.

George, using the graph api explorer I have confirmed that the issue appears to be that the information for the venue is listed in the event object and can be accessed. The issue only occurs when you try to access the venue object by id directly.

Suggestion. Add the venue with the data in the event object or link it to that venue if it already exists in the calendar.

That way if I as a calendar admin, I have Updated the incomplete venue, it will still get used/linked.

Let me know if you need anymore about how I came to this understanding.

Thanks, Doug.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by Douglas.

Hey folks,

Great news! After a lot of work and effort, we were able to make release what we believe is a great solution for the issue of events not importing from Facebook due to certain Facebook API restrictions.

Since this thread was opened, not only has Facebook updated it API, but we have developed a new product called Event Aggregator that is fully compatible with it and overcomes the importing issues that Facebook Events encountered.

Event Aggregator is now available and you should even have a complimentary license for it if you already have an active Facebook Events license to help you make the switch.

In addition, we’ve put together a handy guide that outlines best practices for importing events using Event Aggregator to help get the most out of your imports:

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/plugin/event-aggregator/

Thanks so much for your patience while we worked on this. We know it has been a long-running item everyone’s wishlist and we couldn’t be more excited to finally get it into your hands.

Cheers,
Geoff