Author error for Anonymous Submissions

[jussibr]

When a guest submits and event the author get’s set to the first username alphabetically. I need the user to be the admin, or not shown at all. Currently I have to go through all the events and manually reset the user name.

[Barry]

Hi!

Sorry you’re facing difficulties.

When an event is submitted anonymously it isn’t actually assigned to any author. To bear this out, try anonymously submitting an event – then, in the list of events that displays in the admin environment, add the author column (via the Filters & Columns meta box that displays above the list) and hit apply: you should see that the newly submitted event has no author.

Within the event editor, though, WordPress will attempt to assign an author as soon as it is edited – so as part of your workflow you could set this appropriately when you approve/publish/edit the event.

One thing I’m not clear on is why this is a problem, exactly – ordinarily the event author isn’t exposed in single event view (and, looking at your site, I don’t see it being exposed in single event pages there, either).

Just to help us get a better handle on why this is causing you difficulties, can you describe where this is being exposed and why that’s problematic? It’s certainly something we could think about revising in a future release, but I’d love a little more insight 🙂

[jussibr]

Hi there – thanks for the reply. I understand we do not see the author on the event listings themselves. But should a user use the search function and view posts in the archive format search result they then see the author listed. In this case the author that is shown is one of our writers and it is important that they are not being set as the athor of hundreds of separate events.

Thanks!

[jussibr]

I should also add that I used to use the filter section to add the author column into the admin event listings – then select them all and do a bulk change. This saved considerable time. However, for some reason the author column will no longer appear when I add it.

[Barry]

OK, so one possibility would be to customize your theme such that if a search result relates to an event post you do not expose the author.

If it would help to have a new setting to assign a particular user as author (for anonymous submissions, for example) we’d certainly be open to a feature request along these lines 🙂

[jussibr]

Hi – I have seen this question asked awhile ago, so I’m not the first to mention it. The default post author in wordpress is the admin – so why would the events plug-in work differently?

[Barry]

I’m not sure I agree that there is a direct parallel in WordPress – since an anonymous user is not permitted to create posts in the normal run of things.

Since in this scenario there is no user account that the submission can be tied to, Community Events doesn’t set the author field (and WordPress doesn’t populate it with a default, as it might do for a number of other post fields). When you subsequently edit the post to approve it you then have an opportunity to assign it at that point, but the nature of the author dropdown in the editor screen is that it settles on the first user in the list.

So, by default, if you don’t assign it to a specific user but edit and save the submission it will be assigned to the first user in the list. I can definitely see why you might not like that and we’d certainly be open to a feature request here.

Does that clarify things?

[Barry]

Hi! It’s been a while so I’m going to go ahead and close this thread. If we can help with anything else, though, please don’t hesitate to create new threads as needed. Thanks!

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