Duplicate Venues and Organizers

[Thomas Claffy]

I looked thru your forums and saw that this was an item that was addressed and yet a user was able to add a duplicate venue today on my site. What constitutes a duplicate? Why aren’t user submitted venues subject to moderation the same as a post? And likewise for an organizer? Both should come in as draft.

[Geoff B.]

Good afternoon Thomas and welcome back!

Thank you for reaching out to us.

We are sorry to hear about the fact that a user was able to create a duplicate venue.
I would love to help you with this topic.

As a first troubleshooting step, could you please provide us with your complete system information in a private reply using the instructions found in the following link?

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/

What constitutes a duplicate?

That is a great question. Typically, a duplicate has the same name as an existing entry as well as at least one other identical value (e.g.: the address).

Why aren’t user submitted venues subject to moderation the same as a post? And likewise for an organizer?

You are making a very interesting feature suggestion.

As you know, venues and organizers are closely tied to event creation.
If only the venue part and the organizer part were subject to moderation, the logical thing to do would be to not display the event. The reasoning behind this is that it makes no sense to publish an event that is missing these 2 crucial components. At least the majority of the time.

Another way to go about this might be to add validation on new  venues and organizers (with a lookup on existing entries), which in turn would prompt the user with a warning message.

In fact, you can suggest it or cast your vote on other features in our User Voice forum.

In the meantime, as you might know, you can simply set every Community submitted entry to default to “draft” (that is the whole event), not just venue and organizer.

It might not be ideal, but it will give you a chance to moderate things.

I wish I had a better answer for you, but for now it’s the best one I have.

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[Thomas Claffy]

Thanks Geoff,

I have them set to moderate but Event itself does not tell me that I have a draft venue or a draft organizer attached. It would be very helpful if that were indicated in bold by the new data. I guess best practices have to be reviewing venues and organizers prior to approving draft events as the new entries are marked as draft. Doable but not implemented very easily because as soon as I remove the duplicate draft then the event loses all references to what it was. Not even a note that original was ‘x’ but ‘x’ no longer exists. In my world we must have referential integrity and we don’t allow reference data that is in use to be deleted. You must change the usage (event venue) 1st then the reference (venue) record can be removed. Guess I’ll throw some of this in the suggestion box if I can get around to it.

[Geoff B.]

Good afternoon Thomas,

I totally see your point, especially for somebody like you that works in a high data integrity environment.

As you might know, currently the only thing we offer built-in are the buttons that can merge duplicate venues and organizers. Based on your requirements however, this does not meet your needs at all.

As suggested earlier, you might want to use our User voice forum so that this can be improved on as a feature request.

In the meantime, I believe your work might be simplified by creating a custom MySQL script that you could run when you are moderating new events. The goal of the script would be to produce a list of any potential duplicates and perhaps which event they are attached to.

Have a good week-end,

Geoff B.

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

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