Filter Bar Location has Duplicate Autocomplete Entries

[Damion]

Greetings!

A couple months back we had issues with states’ full names and their abbreviations competing with each other to claim certain events: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/states-listed-in-multiple-formats-based-on-import-but-not-on-database/

Meaning, FL and Florida were completely separate when running a search, even though, ideally, both would be acceptable and mean the same thing to the system, regardless of what was input. Weirdly, it was hard to find any traces of the abbreviations in the Venue information in the database. There were some events where on the single event detail page, yes, it used the abbreviation, presumably from being entered that way in an import. But it also looked like, after the import, the plug-in did the conversion. It just hasn’t appeared to honor that in practice in search.

Now we’re back to something similar, though I imagine this might be simpler or down to user error. In the Filter Bar, we’re having duplicates with the City filter, where there is both an ORLANDO, for example, and an Orlando. Is there a way for it to mix these together? To ignore case sensitivity, but also to just never show extra versions in the first place?

If not, is there a suggestion as far as how to reform the database to get them to match?

Cheers,
Vincent J.

[Damion]

Just a quick heads up (it doesn’t look like I can edit the original message), the actual HTML only appears to have regular Orlando in it (with a comma separated list of attribute values for the option tag), but ORLANDO in caps still comes up and provides a lack of results.

[Nico]

Hey Damion,

Thanks for getting in touch about this! Let’s see what we can do here…

Basically I guess this is how it works, it just collects the information from the venues, so there are different type of duplicates. In the case of ORLANDO and Orlando we can do better but there are other cases like Dallas Forth Worth and Dallas or Forth Worth that will need to be manually adjusted / merged, although those have duplicates with the same name as well.

Can you please let me know how are events being created in the site? Community Events? Imports?

Please let me know about it so I can continue to help,
Best,
Nico

[Damion]

Initially, the built in import tool using CSV, by the site admin.

For the past few months, mostly (but in much smaller proportion) Community Events with newly registered screened/moderated users of a special membership type.

There are some clear human errors in that regard, like things that are not city names at all, but the reason for this is mostly straightforward as you visit the edit venue screen and it was typed just that way.

Like you intimated, though, we’re really more worried about things that look invented by the system on their own when there’s nothing yet found in the database or the edit screens to suggest a motivation for it to do so.

We’ve thought about workarounds like adding a text box that leads to another page that’s more of a directory style template based off of their input, since you could then intercept and interpret the query yourself, but without knowing where to start with calling AJAX to update the calendar throwing people off of the page isn’t nearly as engaging or intuitive.

Not to mention it feels silly to keep using a Filter Bar when your site is set up in such a way that you keep having to turn off more pieces of the Filter Bar (that’s a comment about not yet identifying the cause and fully anticipating the source data playing into it…your work, collectively, is too polished and well maintained for anyone to accuse it of being hacky…It also has to deal with a bunch of different sites and setups and wonky data and sometimes maybe it just isn’t time for it to work out with certain sites through no fault of its own 🙂

Really appreciate the help as always!

[Nico]

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[Damion]

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[Damion]

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[Nico]

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[Damion]

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[Nico]

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[Trisha]

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[Trisha]

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[Damion]

Hi Trisha,

Apologies for the delayed response as I’ve been in the hospital for quite some time recently and recovery’s been a bit slower than anticipated since I got out.

I’m also a big fan of the interconnectit script; most of the time I manually move a site between domains, it’s my tool of choice. Also nice for adjusting protocols between HTTP and HTTPS when there are hiccups from someone having an SSL cert change.

For searching these values out up until now, I mostly have been using phpMyAdmin, just doing SELECT queries to see what’s come up. Weirdly, my results to date have basically been your screenshot, which is to say, if there’s a state mentioned in the Venue part of the database, it’s the full name. I could not find abbreviations and would not have thought to force full names into abbreviations, as it’s not how they come and I figured it was the wrong spot to be doing it, since (what appeared to be) one kind of value was nevertheless producing two different kinds of values on the front end. I didn’t want to complicate things.

Do you have any query advice as far as finding only those results which are -just- the state name? Probably exact match, right? I don’t want to overwrite actual written content or titles with abbreviations like in the top of that last screenshot. There are barely any races there and there are nearly 400 returned results, so anything to shave down the time seems like a lovely idea =)

When you say,

“Also, it is worth noting that if you are using the latest version of Events Community, the State fields are auto-populated so that going forward you shouldn’t see any more errors like this.”

I am not sure what you mean. Not because it’s not clear, but because I still have half a brain after the hospital stay =) You’re saying if I manually go through and change out the full names to abbreviations , the dropdown will be full of only those abbreviations? I am hopeful that it will return results for both full name and abbreviation rather than returning different results as happens now.

I did upgrade, though, for what it’s worth =)

Thanks to you both for being such a big assist in sorting this out! It’s not ideal input, and I can appreciate that, we’re just trying to make the most of it =)

[Trisha]

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[Damion]

I’m going to mark this resolved. You really couldn’t have been more clear, especially in going over things a second time to underline what you meant, and even taking the time to illustrate it!

I was concerned about the possibility of the consolidation effort fixing new events and the actual search mechanism itself, but then leaving the events which were marked for one way or the other (whichever was the name, abbreviation or full, that did not get selected to be the main/remaining one) just no longer being searchable and kind of being orphaned, but it doesn’t look like that will be the case.

I can’t tell you how nice it is having you all as a support team. We have taken a powerful plugin perhaps best suited to normal human scale of events and asking it to deal with a wonky import source material and a giant backlog, and then to play nice across multiple add-ons each with their own ongoing changes, to say nothing of core.

And there are precious few hiccups. Far fewer than their ought to be. And for those couple that exist, you guys have spent all kinds of time and energy to make it as smooth a transition as possible. And now on top of everything to thank us for our patience and to extend a generous gift our way tgat we might get further use out of this already powerhouse package…? I’m the one thanking you (I, Vincent, on behalf of our site)…

I guess I’ll just say, I know how hard it can be doing support. How bad you want to help, how little information you have available to you that you’re given sometimes to be able to help with no less expectation (or desperation) on the customer end…and of course the sheer costs you eat going out of your way to nail down and work out the problems.

You are all worth your weight several times over.

One of the nice things experience gives me as a developer that I can communicate to clients is the ability to vet and vouch for plugins. You need a slider? Here are the really good ones, the easy to use ones, the reliable ones…and so on.

It’s so easy to recommend you guys for events. You make it easy. And beyond that I smile when I go to another site and see you’re already there…where you belong!

Going to update things soon thanks you your help. Wish me luck!

[Author]

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