Filter bar not working with aggregator

[heatherkitching]

Hi guys,
Further to my question about searching events by city, I just spent another hundred bucks to buy the filter bar, as suggested, but unfortunately, it does not meet my functionality requirements. The reason for this is that most of my calendar items are imported through aggregator and aggregator does not allow me to add a city field to the imported events. (most of the venues I’m importing from don’t bother to list the city in their Facebook listings because their audience is already in that city and knows where they are). The only field Aggregator allows me to add is category.

Is there a workaround for this? A way to add a bulk city field when importing?

[heatherkitching]

Further to this, part of the problem seems to be that, when Aggregator is importing events from a the Facebook page of an event organizer, where the organize is ALSO the venue, it imports the venue into the organizer field and not into the venue field.

However, even where the venue is clearly specified in Facebook, Aggregator appears to be failing to import this in the majority of cases. I’m looking at imports right now where one event was imported from an organizer page with the event field properly imported….and another event from the same Facebook page at the SAME venue failed to transfer the venue info properly.

[Victor]

Hi Heather!

Thanks for getting in touch with us! Let me help you with that issue.

First, let me note that Facebook recently announced a range of changes to their APIs (the protocols we use to ‘speak’ to their servers and retrieve event information) which are having an affect on Event Aggregator users.

As a result, some Facebook imports that previously worked are not currently possible. Further details can be found in the following article > https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/ea-fb-privacy-policy/

Regarding the city missing from the venue location upon import, you could customize your imports to always assign an existing venue with a city, but would require some custom coding.

We are fairly limited in how much support we can give for custom development, but we always like helping out and at least point users into the right direction as much possible.

So, if that is a convenient workaround for you, please let me know and I’ll try to come up with a snippet for you to try.

Let me know about it.

Thanks,
Victor

[heatherkitching]

Hi Victor,
Will Events Calendar be adding this functionality to its next update? It’s frustrating to have to pay my coder to customize your software when I’m already paying a lot for this software. Being able to bulk assign fields to imports would seem like a necessary feature in order for it to work properly with the Filter Bar add-on with or without Facebook’s latest privacy changes.
h

[Victor]

Hi Heather!

Unfortunately, that is not a feature we are planning to include at the moment. However, I did find a user voice idea about it > https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/13061778-set-default-venue

I suggest you add your vote to it so it gets a better chance of being added in a future feature release of our plugin.

I understand your frustration for having to customize the plugin to achieve what you are looking for. As a reference, let me point you to the following thread were Barry shared a snippet for a very similar request from a user that you can reuse > https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/custom-function-on-event-import/#dl_post-1297186

I hope that helps. Let me know if any follow up questions.

Best,
Victor

[heatherkitching]

Hi Victor,
This is very frustrating to hear. Having just admitted that Facebook’s new policies have effectively broken your bulk importing add-on, rendering it useless to anyone using a location search, I would have hoped that you would recognize the need to expedite this fix, as it is now a much bigger issue than it was when the complaints were limited to thinks like private meetups (the ethics of adding a location being somewhat questionable in those cases). How many people are going to have to vote for this before it becomes a priority?

[heatherkitching]

Hi Victor,
This is very frustrating to hear. Having just admitted that Facebook’s new policies have effectively broken your bulk importing add-on, rendering it useless to anyone using a location search or needing to know what venue something is at (a pretty important detail), I would have hoped that you would recognize the need to expedite this fix, as it is now a much bigger issue than it was when the complaints were limited to things like private meetups (the ethics of adding a location being somewhat questionable in those cases). How many people are going to have to vote for this before it becomes a priority?

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by heatherkitching.

[heatherkitching]

I should add that, you should at least remove from your promotional material for Aggregator any suggestion that it imports events from Facebook. It no longer does so effectively. At least in this way nobody else will spend $89 on it believing they are getting functionality that it does not, in fact, provide.

[Victor]

Hi Heather,

I totally understand your frustration with all the recent Facebook changes. Let me try to help you.

First, let me note that we’ve already made the fixes needed in Event Aggregator so that it is possible to import events from Facebook again. However, some imports that used to work, such as Facebook group imports, are no longer possible. The following article has already been updated to reflect the current state of things > https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/ea-fb-privacy-policy/

Your location search issue, however, is not related to the Facebook changes. Venues are still possible to be fetched from Facebook events, so you should be able to use Filter Bar to filter your Facebook events by venue.

even where the venue is clearly specified in Facebook, Aggregator appears to be failing to import this in the majority of cases.

I cannot reproduce this on my end, so if this is still happening for your imports, please share the Facebook URL where you are importing events from, so I can run some tests with it and see what I can find.

If, for any reason, you think Event Aggregator does not meet your needs, we’d be sad to see you go, but you can ask for a full refund of your license as you are within the 30-day refund policy > https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/refund-policy/

I hope that helps. Please let us know how that goes and if you have any questions.

Best,
Victor

[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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