Eventbrite error: Venue name already exists

[Barry]

Aaron, our fault for not highlighting this (though you may have found and tried it already) but please visit Events > Settings > General > Duplicate Venues & Organizers and click on Merge Duplicates … this should perform some clean up work that hopefully will alleviate this problem.

If it continues, our developer has suggested you may need to delete any pre-existing venues already on eventbrite.com itself – however after that it should, hopefully, be plain sailing.

[Aaron]

Hi Barry
Please see this screen shot of my Events > Settings page: http://arll.co/image/0s3a2v2e3q3s
I see no option to merge duplicate venues. This is using the v3.0.beta plugins for both the Events Calendar and Events Calendar Pro I was sent last week.

[Barry]

That button will not appear again after its first use … can you confirm if you haven’t seen or used it at all, or if you have used the tool already?

[Barry]

Hi Aaron, just checking in here – can you indicate if you might have already used that button (which would explain it’s current absence)?

[Aaron]

Hi Barry, Sorry for the delay replying – have been on other projects for a couple of days. OK, regarding the duplicate venue thing, I can confirm there never was any button to merge duplicates – I never saw the feature, let alone use it.

In any case, I wasn’t very happy with the v3.0 software as it caused issues with my custom views and templates, so I’ve reverted back to version 2 with the Pro addon that you provided. I then went through and manually deleted all duplicate venues, and unassociated all events with Eventbrite. I then logged in to Eventbrite and deleted all events, all organisers, and all venues. I then logged back in to WordPress and re-linked each event with EventBrite being careful to use the same venue resource and event organiser resource.

It was a complete pain in the backside, but it all seems to be working now. I think from this we can conclude that the Eventbrite plugin requires the Pro addon to function correctly – if you intend to add more than a couple of events for the same venue. If we’d have known this upfront we would have happily bought the Pro addon. I think Modern Tribe should update their sales website accordingly as this isn’t at all clear.

[Barry]

Point taken; all I can really say is the intention was that it would work without Pro without causing problems like this – and on that level we’ve plainly failed.

3.0 is still in beta so I can understand your not being happy with it, however once it is released in stable form it should address this issue for those users who want to use Eventbrite and our core plugin without also purchasing Pro.

I understand completely that this has been a massive pain for you – and I’d like to thank you for being so patient while we ran through the troubleshooting process here, which has if nothing else motivated changes to our codebase.

[Rob]

Hey Aaron. Thanks for the note here, and for providing your feedback on this so far. We understand your frustrations on this end and I wanted to thank you on behalf of the whole team for your patience and willingness to work through the issue with us. This is indeed a lame position to find yourself in, and we let you down here by not providing a solution that works as seamlessly as it should. Luckily, as you’ve seen, once we make the jump to 3.0 this should be largely a moot point, so your experience shouldn’t be felt by too many others.

That said, I want to make things right by you. You’ve spent a lot of time on something that wasn’t your problem to begin with, and if there is something that can help offset that – I’m thinking a free PRO license if you were interested – please don’t hesitate to let me know. I can be reached by email at rob /a/ tri.be and can get you sorted on a free PRO license (or another add-on license if you’d prefer).

Thanks again for your patience and understanding so far, and for using The Events Calendar. Hope to hear from you soon.

[4dscs]

Having the same venue name exists issue (not using PRO) and just wanted to subscribe to this thread for any updates. Hope you don’t mind me tagging along. –Joe

[Barry]

No problem at all – as with Aaron we’d be happy to provide a copy of the current version of Pro if you wanted to try that out – otherwise this should be resolved in the next release 🙂

[4dscs]

Hi Barry. I’m still developing the site so there’s no immediate need but thank you for the offer to try out Pro. Do you have an estimate as to when the next release may be released? I’ve got a few more weeks until I launch but if you think it may be longer than that, I may need to upgrade.

[Barry]

Hi 4dscs … tricky question. I’d like to say it will be available in a few weeks but I just can’t guarantee it. We’re happy to do our best to help out and send over a copy of Pro if that gives you a more concrete basis to build on.

[4dscs]

Hi Barry. I will discuss this with my client to see if they are ok with upgrading to Pro. It’s an extra expense but if it eliminates the issue, which is seems like it does, then it may be the right decision.

Thanks,
Joe

[Barry]

You could probably use PRO purely as a temporary measure until the 3.0 release arrives, at which point it should no longer be necessary and you could then remove it – again we’re definitely happy to provide it to you free of charge on that basis.

[4dscs]

Hi Barry. I apologize for the delay in responding. Thank you for the offer to use PRO as a temp solution. One question I have is what would happen to all the events – past and future – that were setup on PRO and integrated with EventBrite once I remove PRO and switch back to Free using 3.0?

[Barry]

Any event you set up will still exist upon removal of the PRO plugin … however, if you use PRO features such as setting up recurring event patterns then you’d see effects such as the first event in the series staying in place and the future instances effectively disappearing (though the data would still be in the database).

Does that help at all? If you need me to clarify anything in further detail please don’t hesitate to ask.

[Author]

Posts