Advanced List Widget Graphic Date doesn't match actual date

[Shannon]

The calendar graphic on the Advanced List Widget isn’t matching the actual dates for some of my events. If you look at the 1st event and 5th event on our site’s home page, you’ll see what I mean.

[George]

Hey @Shannon,

Sorry to see this issue on your site! It’s an odd one, and I unfortunately cannot recreate this on my testing site, so I’m not sure there’s a bug here – there could be a code conflict with your theme [or another plugin]. To investigate if this is the case I would recommend going through all of the steps here → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/testing-for-conflicts/

After each step in the process, check on the front-page again and see if anything about this issue changes.

Let us know what you find! I will keep investigating in the meantime, as well, because as noted at this time I cannot recreate this yet.

Thank you,
George

[Shannon]

I deactivated all plugins except The Events Calendar and The Events Calendar PRO and switched my theme to 2015. I flushed the cache on the WP dashboard and cleared the browser cache. The 1st and last item in the current list of events on the homepage still showed the same issue.

Because of another strange issue I was having with recurring events, I deleted the 1/12 Troop Meeting event earlier today and imported it along with the rest of the years’ meetings. So..the 1/12 & 1/19 meeting (both showing the same issue) are brand new events.

I’m not sure what else to do.

[George]

Hey Shannon,

Thank you for sharing this information and for your patience here.

I reached out to developers and it does seem like there’s a known bug here. However, it’s very hard to reproduce and is not consistent.

So the good news is that there is a known bug here. I say “good” because that means we can coordinate a fix for this and try to include a bug fix in an upcoming release.

The bad news is that I unfortunately do not have any ETA on when this bug fix will arrive – like I mentioned, it’s been hard for us to pin down this issue 🙁

I’m sorry to bear this bad news! Please let me know what you think and if I can help with anything else.

Sincerely,
George

[Shannon]

This reply is private.

[George]

Hey @Shannon,

I agree that this is disappointing. I’m sorry about this reality and would like to address your separate points.

1. First, yes you can temporarily remove those erroneous date icons until a bug fix arrives. To do this, you would need to add the following CSS to the bottom of your theme’s style.css file:


.tribe-mini-calendar-event .list-date {
display: none !important;
}


2. Next, I would like to address your comments about this bug not being mentioned in the “marketing literature”. Bugs do not belong on the marketing pages for a product, which is why it was not mentioned there. For context, every single new release of our products comes with some fixes for old bugs, and some new bugs of its own. This is the nature of software. Events Calendar Pro is not a finite product, it is a living and breathing piece of software that is constantly evolving. And so to update our “static” marketing page for every single release does not make sense. (Plus, if we knew about the bug before shipping, we would not have written about it – we would have fixed it! 😀 )

This is very much the norm for any piece of software. A good and quick example is just WordPress itself – check out the front page for WordPress, http://wordpress.org

• What is the number of code bugs you see listed on the front page of http://wordpress.org?

• How does this number compare to the number of actual development tickets that “need-patch” (need to be patched; fixed; etc.) on the actual WordPress development tracker? → https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/needs-patch

As you can see, at the time of my writing this, there are 2,081 bugs, enhancements, and tweaks that need addressing within the WordPress code base.

And the number of these things listed on the homepage? 0. [zero]

I only mention all of this because I really, really do not want you to feel like we are trying to swindle folks or something. It is a norm to not list bugs right on the main marketing page of a product, because the marketing of and development for a piece of software are separate things. We make our product page a static page that we do not need to update specifically so that we can spend more time on the actual product code instead of updating that page 🙂

Bugs – and the frustrating, time-constrained realities of fixing them – are part-and-parcel of open source software like WordPress, The Events Calendar, Events Calendar Pro, and others.

I hope that you can see that bugs are common, which is of course an unfortunate fact – and for a bug like the one you have, it is especially embarrassing because this bug with the mismatched dates is very easy to see and is very discordant for users when they visit the page.

I am genuinely sorry about the existence of the bug, and the fact that there is not a specific ETA for when this bug will arrive. However, what follows from all of this is not an extra set of discounts or extra support time. What follows for you is what follows for all of our customers: a guarantee that we take this seriously and are working hard on a bug fix.

We patch bugs in our premium plugins faster than in our free ones; this is one of the benefits of being a premium license holder.

But at this time, there are not discounts or license extensions I can grant you.

Please let me know your thoughts on all of this. I hate seeing bugs like this and knowing the frustration from your end. As I mentioned earlier, this bug is not something we are all recreating; it’s a hard bug to track down and there may be a third-party code conflict element to this. So I do not know when we will have a fully-tested fix in place.

But a fix is underway and your patience with us is much appreciated while we keep working on this and other bugs.

Please share thoughts and let me know any further questions, comments, and concerns you might have. I cannot fix this bug immediately – though I would if I knew its source! – but am happy to try just about anything else I can do to help here.

Sincerely,
George

[Shannon]

This reply is private.

[George]

Hey @Shannon,

I’m glad to hear the code is a solution for now. As for what I wrote, none of it is to undermine the fact that we are working hard on this and other bugs – please stay tuned to plugin updates in your site’s wp-admin dashboard; if this is addressed in a specific update, it will be noted in the “Changelog”. It will also be noted in release notes on our blog, which can be found here → http://theeventscalendar.com/blog

I’ll close up this thread for now since there is a temporary solution in place – if other issues arise, open a new thread any time!

Sincerely,
George

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