Changing times on Eventbrite

[prydonian]

I’ve been having issues with the plugin changing the event times on Eventbrite. I contacted their support team and got this response:

I spoke with a member of our API team, and I have a minor update!

This looks to be an issue with the Modern Tribe plug-in that you are using. For some reason it’s making an event_update call and changing the event time. I and our API team are investigating on our end, but you can also reach out to Modern Tribe as they built the application and may have a better angle from which to troubleshoot.

I hope this helps! I will keep the updates coming as we have them and I appreciate your patience.

I originally sent them this query:

WE’VE BEEN HAVING A RECURRING PROBLEMS WITH OUR EVENTS ADDING ONE HOUR TO THE PLANNED TIMES OF EVENTS OVER THE LAST TWO MONTHS. E.G. :- AN EVENT PLANNED TO START AT 17:30 WILL CHANGE TO START AT 18:30, ETC. IT SEEMS TO ADD AN HOUR TO ALL THE PREVIOUSLY PLANNED EVENTS AND WE’RE NOT SURE WHAT’S CAUSING IT.

[Barry]

Hi prydonian,

Neither WordPress nor The Events Calendar support setting individual timezones on a post-per-post basis. For that reason, when you import events using our Eventbrite plugin, a conversion takes place from the source timezone to whatever your local timezone is.

If you then manually “correct” this, and update your local copy of the event, it will indeed attempt to update the matching event over on eventbrite.com (and maintains the timezone difference).

This can result in a seeming jump like you described.

Does that match your experiences here? In other words, are you manually adjusting the time of imported events and finding this problem takes place after that?

[prydonian]

Hi

No, this happened shortly after I’d imported the events. There was no editing of the events, it just changed all of the EventBrite times.

[Barry]

I’m really surprised to hear that: if you don’t edit an event, it shouldn’t try to update Eventbrite. Are the following steps an accurate way to reproduce the problem?

• Create an event on eventbrite.com and publish it
• Grab the event ID
• Import into your local WordPress installation
• Do nothing else with this event (at least, do nothing else from within WordPress/The Events Calendar)

And still you find the event spontaneously changes over on eventbrite.com? Is there anything else that’s missing here, such as changing the local event status from draft/pending to published or similar?

If that is an accurate set of steps would it be possible for you to create a new test event (on eventbrite.com) and share the event ID as a private message – but don’t actually import it yourself – so I can try simulating the problem?

Thanks!

[prydonian]

Yes, they’re still changing. I just imported and then did nothing to them. We’ve been getting calls that the event times have changed.

As the events are live (and the website is in development), I’ve had to disable the plugin and go back and re edit the events on eventbrite to correct the event times.

[prydonian]

It also appears to be editing content on the Eventbrite ‘About’ page as well. It’s been adding contact details and other information from the development site to the live events. Might I suggest adding a setting to the plugin that stops it doing this for sites that are still in dev, but want to copy over existing content?

[Barry]

How odd. I’m wondering a few other things:

• When you say the times change shortly after importing, what sort of timescale are we talking about? Is it almost instant, is there a gap of just a few minutes or is it a number of hours, etc?
• When you refer to the Eventbrite “About” page, do you simply mean the public facing page for your event over on eventbrite.com where customers can purchase tickets?
• Do you have or can you create a test site running just our Eventbrite plugin plus The Events Calendar, and see if you can replicate this issue there, too, with nothing else running on that site except for a default theme?

Thanks!

[prydonian]

It seems to be almost instant.

Yes, the public facing page for the event.

I’ve had to disable the plugin to stop it happening again as they have over 200 events listed and they don’t want the dev site details appearing on the other events.

[Barry]

Thanks pyrdonian,

I think I see what could be happening here.

Can you confirm the timezone your WordPress site is using (visit Settings → General to find out) and also give me an example of one of the events you are importing?

Thanks!

[prydonian]

The site is on London (GMT)
GMT time is 2015-01-09 21:30:29 Local time is 2015-01-09 21:30:29

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rock-chalk-and-sausages-tickets-14775797809?aff=es2&rank=1

[Barry]

At this point, can we roll things back a stage and confirm that a conflict isn’t at work?

Your description of events doesn’t fit with those timezone issues reported by others and even using the event you shared in your last reply I cannot replicate (I viewed the event first, noted it’s times, switched my test site to London time then imported – and it came across with exactly the same start and end time, nor was the original event on eventbrite.com modified after the fact).

For those reasons, I suspect a conflict. Would you be able to run through our complete troubleshooting steps and can you confirm this issue still happens with only The Events Calendar, Eventbrite Tickets and a default theme in place? Assuming for the moment the problem does not occur under those conditions, can you start enabling everything that you currently have in place and try to identify where the conflict might be coming from?

Thanks!

[prydonian]

Even disabling everything and using the default theme, I’m still getting the event organiser details updated from the dev site. The date / time didn’t change, but the event details were updated with the dev site url and organiser details.

[Barry]

OK, so to summarize:

• Under “test conditions”, with nothing but our plugins running, the original problem (the event times changing) does not occur
• However, a different problem does occur under these conditions and involves the organizer details being modified over on eventbrite.com after you import the event into WordPress

Is that accurate?

If so, and dealing with the initial problem first of all, are you able to find the source of the conflict? That’s to say, if you reactivate each plugin and ultimately your theme one-by-one, testing at each stage, do you find that one of them in particular triggers the time displacement?

Moving on to the second issue, can you provide a little more detail? What were the organizer details prior to importing the event and in what way did they change exactly?

Thanks for your patience as we work through this 🙂

[prydonian]

Well, as far as I’m aware it hasn’t altered the time on that particular event, but it didn’t alter all of them even when the other plugins and theme were in place either. It only did it to some and not others, which is why the problem was so hard to pin down.

I would categorise the adding of the event organiser details as part of the same issue – the plugin is overwriting the event details. Normally, there is Organiser Name and links to Facebook & Twitter. The plugin is adding the contents of the Organiser from TEC to this in a new block on Eventbrite (the same as if you click “Add new” under Organiser name).

Is there a section of code that I could comment out in the plugin that would stop it updating the events whilst the dev site is still being built and content added (so it doesn’t add the extra details) and then uncomment when the site goes live?

[Barry]

The fact that the problem is so sporadic definitely does make this tricky to resolve.

So far I’ve been unable to replicate locally – added to which I can’t locate any similar reports from other customers, which does rather suggest it is something atypical about your particular installation.

I would categorise the adding of the event organiser details as part of the same issue – the plugin is overwriting the event details.

It does sound like it could be part and parcel of the same problem – yet it doesn’t appear that the plugin actually tries to update eventbrite.com immediately after importing an event, at least not under “default conditions”.

A sequence of event_get requests (which retrieve information but do not cause events to be updated) are indeed triggered when you import – but I don’t see any organizer_update, venue_update or event_update requests unless I specifically go into the event and make a change.

All in all, I still suspect a conflict somewhere along the line, despite the fact that following our troubleshooting/conflict test steps didn’t seem to get us toward a conclusion 🙁

Is there a section of code that I could comment out in the plugin that would stop it updating the events whilst the dev site is still being built and content added (so it doesn’t add the extra details) and then uncomment when the site goes live?

I don’t recommend modifying core plugin code, but if you feel confident doing so you could edit each of the following methods (all found in lib/tribe-eventbrite.class.php):

• Event_Tickets_PRO::do_event_organizer()
• Event_Tickets_PRO::do_event_venue()
• Event_Tickets_PRO::do_event_update()

You could try commenting them out entirely, or else simply add a return statement to the top of each. Again, I’d stress you should only take this approach if you absolutely feel confident doing so.

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