Community Events and Address Issues

[Kevin]

I’m having a significant problem with the community events feature on my website. I’m allowing people in the community to add their yard sale information to the calendar of events so people can easily find where the good sales are at. This is a FREE service for the community. However, when people are adding their location into the Google Map Address Form, it is not relaying that information over to the event page on the calendar. I believe I have figured out that this problem is occurring because users are putting a general location (such as Main Street, Reading, PA) as opposed to a specific address that Google can locate. So if they are not putting exact addresses (which typically can’t be done for large community yard sales) no address at all carries over to the actual listing. I need to figure out if this can be fixed ASAP because 90% of the listings only contain information about the sale and not the location. If we can’t fix the issue, is it possible to just remove the Address bar form the form altogether and modify the description section with a note that tells people to include their address information there? Can someone please help?

http://www.berkscountyyardsales.com

[Casey]

tayls,
Thanks for getting in touch and sorry to hear you’re having trouble here, but hopefully I can help. It does appear that users are not entering the address information in the correct address fields (see this event).

I would suggest adding some instructions to the top of the submission form that instructs users to enter their address if they wish for people to find their garage sales. You can do this by adding the following code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file: https://gist.github.com/ckpicker/6425075

You’ll need to customize it accordingly to display the instructions that you wish.

Give that a try and see if it solves the problem for you. Thanks! 🙂

-Casey-

[Kevin]

Thanks, Casey. We will incorporate this and see if it helps with the issue. Unfortunately people do not tend to read things and skip over the instructions and right to the form. Hopefully we can make this work. However, it has brought up another issue within the same form. That issue being that people have the option to choose their Venue, which is ultimately saved addresses from other’s submissions. For instance, if someone in Birdsboro is putting their sale information in and pull down that Use Saved Venue menu and choose Birdsboro as their venue, it is adding the address of the person’s home who originally saved the venue as Birdsboro, and not the new address of the person filling out the form. The easiest way to fix this problem would be to remove the menu “Use Saved Venue” from the form entirely. I know this is getting a little custom but is it doable? Or do we need to provide additional instruction at the top of the form for that as well? Again, trying to make this as easy as possible for those average internet users that may not have the intuition of how to properly use the page as a whole. Thanks again for your help!

[Casey]

tayls,
Take a look at this thread, which should give some instructions about how to hide the saved Venue dropdown. After reviewing that, just let me know if you have further questions. Thanks! 🙂

-Casey-

[Kevin]

Thanks for the help Casey. All of your suggestions worked perfectly.

[Casey]

Awesome! Thanks for confirming that this got you sorted. Since it looks like you’re all set, I’m going to mark this thread “Answered” and close it out.

By the way, if you have a minute or two, we would love it if you’d write a few words for us here: http://m.tri.be/lo

Thanks in advance. 🙂

Cheers,
Casey

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