Exclusions broken as of 4.0 release

[Jon Chabun]

More trouble since updating: recurring event exclusions are no longer being respected.

At this point, with the time stamps and link forwarding also broken, our site’s basically borked so I’m switching back to the last 3.x version – but this has got to get fixed.

[Jon Chabun]

Rolling back to 3.x on its own didn’t solve this problem, but rolling back and then changing the time zone back to Vancouver (after we’d changed them all manually to Los Angeles as per this thread: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/event-times-changed-now-all-incorrect/) resolved this problem (for now). But this is getting a bit much – I’m spending hours and hours of time I can’t charge my client for to try and resolve this. Not cool.

[Brook]

Howdy Matt,

I am truly sorry that this has been a pain. No exaggeration, we spend a hundred plus hours every release doing QA and have nearly 10 people double checking one another. But sometimes bugs can still clip through. We are still working to improve this area though. Specifically we have 2 people whose sole focus right now is building a full fledged test suite, which is helping augment the QA (particularly in areas like recurrences and exclusions).

As with any piece of software it is usually easiest to not upgrade immediately when there is a major release (like 4.0). But instead to wait for a few patches to be released that help address any bugs which were impossibly to catch during prerelease testing. Staying on 3.12 is not a bad strategy for now. We are planning to support it for a while longer.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for the feedback!

• Brook

[Jon Chabun]

Hi Brook,

I do appreciate what goes into building good software – I worked for a software company for 4 years.

Our host auto-updated before I could vet the new version. My frustration just got the better of me.

Still, I think my expectations with paid software are for more rapid responses from tech support – when it’s a critical piece of a major client install, we’re the ones the client looks to for answers, and ‘we’re waiting for a response from someone else’ is hard to sell, and waiting a full day in between responses (which may come late at night, further adding to the delay) is seriously frustrating. I suggest some kind of escalation protocol that can include real-time chat or something – even if that’s another $100 add-on…

Matt

[Brook]

I do appreciate your feedback, Matt. I will share it with the managers.

To be completely frank we are running behind right now on support. Since the release of 4.0 the number of support tickets has over doubled, which has proved highly unusual. And most of the support tickets are not bugs or such. This has caused our response time of less than 24 hours during the weekday, typically less than 6-12 hours, to be increased a fair bit. And I am sorry that this is causing you frustration. We did not anticipate such a high volume.

If you want a refund or anything do ask. You are outside of our typical refund window, but sometimes we can still get the funds back to you with a little bit of trickery. We definitely don’t want unsatisfied customers.

Thanks again for the feedback. Cheers!

– Brook

 

[Jon Chabun]

Hi Brook,

I appreciate the offer of a refund, but the site is completely dependent upon the plugin, with no budget to build a custom system, so we still need an active license. If you wanted to extend an olive branch, I’m sure my client would appreciate an extra year of licensing – they’ve been pretty patient with me as we worked through the issues, but they’re not happy and I don’t blame them.

[Jon Chabun]

Also: has anyone looked at the issue that started this thread (recurring event exclusions are no longer being respected)?

[Brook]

Only fair! Please know we are doing our best, we have been recruiting for months and just brought on a new support individual last week. We’ll keep at it until support times are normalized back to well under 24 hour average.

I am not certain what you mean by “link forwarding” being broken. I do not believe that is an issue we have seen yet. However, we did fix an issue with timestamps being off by a couple of hours in rare scenarios in 4.0.2. So if you upgrade to that version it is likely you will see the timestamp issue go away. Could you elaborate on what the link forwarding issue is?

 

– Brook

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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