FaceBook Imports Not Working

[Dave]

Hi there,

We have a month full of events on FaceBook for May, but only one of them is showing up on our Event Calendar. I’ve reset the FaceBook connectivity, and have manually kicked off the import a few times. It says it works, but says no new events are found.

[Courtney]

Hi there Dave

Thanks so much for reaching out!

Facebook recently announced a range of changes (https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access) to their APIs (the protocols we use to ‘speak’ to their servers and retrieve event information) which are having an effect on a number of our users.

As part of this, a number of new restrictions were applied to their Events API, which is the specific protocol Event Aggregator uses in order to import events, organizers, and venues. These changes went live with little notice to providers such as ourselves. At this point, it does not seem possible to reliably import any events, even if you created and ‘own’ events on Facebook and have linked Event Aggregator to Facebook using those same credentials.

This is frustrating for you, and for developers like us.  As Facebook continues to alter what it allows us to access, we will continue to pursue a path forward for Event Aggregator to import Facebook events.  We will continue to keep https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/ea-fb-privacy-policy and https://theeventscalendar.com/event-aggregator-status/ updated as this unfolds.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Thanks
Courtney 🙂

[Dave]

I knew about the policy changes, but I didn’t realize it was actually stopping Event Calendar Pro from working now.

I realize it’s not the fault of your developers, but with no ETA for a fix, it sounds like we just need to shut down our Web Calendar until it’s resolved. 🙁

[Courtney]

Hey Dave

Events Calendar Pro and The Events Calendar will work. Your calendar should display on your site.

What won’t work is the actual import of Facebook events into Event Aggregator . Events imported from Facebook won’t resolve, so they just won’t be created. The rest of your manually created or other source imported events should still all display on your calendar.

Would that work for you?

Thanks
Courtney 🙂

[Dave]

Hi Courtney. I’m experimenting to see if that’s really scalable. The reality is that FaceBook is our “authoritative” source for all events, which is why we were using Event Calendar Pro / Aggregator in the first place.

Historically, we never created events directly on the website; 100% of our posts were done through the Aggregator.

I’m trying to set up a workflow that ensures the information stays consistent across both Event Calendar Pro and FaceBook, but since it’s now a manual process, it requires a lot more hand-holding. As a small business with only half a dozen employees, all of whom have traditionally posted events in one place (FaceBook) to reach all of our customers (Web and FB), it’s not immediately scalable.

[Courtney]

Hi Dave

I very much understand the dilemma this places on you. If you are unable to further implement Event Aggregator, we could transfer the time remaining on your account to another product/plugin.

Would that be something you are interested in?

Thanks
Courtney 🙂

[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

[Author]

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