Facebook Event not importing correct location

[Peter]

I’ve noticed this on a couple of events where the address is a bit vague, or if the main part of the address is the first line, which I think then gets referenced as being the venue only. It happened with the following event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/414288461943396/
which just showed as being “London” when imported (the Google Map just pointed generically at Charing Cross). I think the venue may show as Fordham Park, which has no postcode details. Perhaps including the venue line as the address as well could help? I didn’t input the address in manually, but chose from the offered ones which Facebook showed up as I was typing.

Hope that gives you enough information.

[Joyce Grace]

Hi Peter, I noticed there wasn’t an actual address entered there. Could you try entering a street address and see if that helps? I realize this may be hard with parks, but it should at least get us one step closer to fixing this issue.

Thanks!

[Peter]

It does work with street addresses – it’s just when that isn’t an option in an imported event (as it will go on what details are in the Facebook event) and so the only option currently is to manually check all events and then manually correct the address.

[Joyce Grace]

Hi Peter, this is interesting. I’m not sure why it would do this – but I will try to see if there is a solution. Can you send me a link to your event that does this, so that I can try to recreate the problem on my side to document properly?

[Peter]

I included the link in the first post: https://www.facebook.com/events/414288461943396/
When this is imported, it only goes to London.

[Rob]

Hey Peter. I’m not sure whether this is a Facebook API issue or something we have control over, but let me get our lead dev Paul to take a look and see if he can identify what’s up with this. Stay tuned and thanks for your patience so far.

[Joyce Grace]

Hello Peter,
After thorough investigation, it was found that this is a Facebook error. Even so, our developers are having a talk on how to fix this. If you want the nitty gritty technical details on why it’s a Facebook error, I can get that over to you, but it’s a lot of long, confusin technical jargon!

Once we know more we’ll let you know if there’s a fix! Hopefully it can get solved somehow!

[Joyce Grace]

Oh dear Peter, I’m sorry – my last response was in regard to your former issues with the timezone not importing correctly. I got confused! Sorry!

[Joyce Grace]

Hi Peter, just wanted you to know, in regards to the timezone issue, we found out the problem is related to the way Facebook handles timezones and for us to fix it we need to create a patch or add-on plugin that would go in and fix all the dates. But with everything on our plate this may not be released in the very near future. We do hope to have it out eventually though, and of course the sooner the better 🙂

Thanks for notifying us of it in the first place!

[Rob]

Hi again Peter. Just wanted to follow-up on this to take point, to both confirm that Joyce — who you’ve been dealing with in this exchange previously — is unfortunately no longer with us. I’ll be taking over here for you.

To recap what our developer has confirmed on this: you’re going to want to update the address inside your WP install, because the address FB API returns is just a natural language string. More specifically since you are using Fordham Park as an example address, if you just copy the venue name into the street field then Google will do best effort to locate center point on the map based on that location.

The issue is because of how FB sends the address (or in the case of this particular example lack of address). The issue arises when there isn’t a logical address sent the reason why Facebook centers to the park is because it uses the location’s “title” as part of the address whereas we are just using the city. If we import the title as part of the address this will fix it but then causes duplication of the record and other nasty gremlins.

Make sense? Let me know if not. I apologize for the inconvenience you’re faced here so far, and please let me know if you have any other questions or need anything else from the devs here.

[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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