Fix needed: Sort attendee checkin by name or email list

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  • #480692
    Adam
    Participant

    I brought this up almost 6 months ago… really this isn’t a feature request, it’s was an oversight that should have been there at the beginning. The checkin screen is mostly useless without the ability to find attendees and check them in.
    https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/wootickets-easy-important-fix-for-checkin/

    To review. On the attendee page there is an option to filter attendees. “Filter by ticket #, order # or security code:”

    The plugin already displays purchaser name, purchaser email. In order for the filter function to be useful you need to add “purchaser name, purchaser email” to the filter.

    Can I get an update on when this fix will be added?

    #489588
    Brook
    Participant

    Howdy mclanea,

    I get where you are coming from. That feature could be useful. I know you stated in your previous thread that you were going to recommend it as a feature. I can not find it though in our User Voice page. Did you go ahead and do that? Do you mind linking me to it?

    I would love to buy your argument that this is a bug and not a feature. But, we do not define bugs like that. That said we value feature requests, especially when folks like you are passionate for them. The reason I asked you for the link to this feature request on User Voice is because I would like to gauge other people’s passion for it by looking at the comments and votes. I would also like to see if there is anything we can do to make it more visible to users who like you would like this ability. We would all love it if we had infinite resources, but since we do not we have to choose which features to implement next based on factors like their popularity.

    Please let me know if you have any questions. I am looking forward to checking this out on user voice and seeing if I can dig up any similar requests elsewhere on the forums. Cheers!

    – Brook

    #489726
    Adam
    Participant

    Uh, if not a bug I’d definitely call it a “glaringly obvious miss.” Like, that functionality is completely useless in real life. Have you ever done checkin at an event? People don’t walk up and say “Hi, my security code is _____.” They say, “Hi, my name is _____.” As it stands right now we’ve had to export the registrations and dump them into a spreadsheet.

    When I originally mentioned this I did go create an account at User Voice and I thought I went through all the steps to add my suggestion.

    Just keeping it real, the pace of development for this plugin is just too slow. Unless we see some major movement over the next month or two this will be our last cycle of events. It’d be just as easy to drop the plugin and add them as a product in WooCommerce or just go back to Eventbrite. The upside, so far, hasn’t been worth the massive loss in features.

    #491356
    Brook
    Participant

    Like, that functionality is completely useless in real life. Have you ever done checkin at an event? People don’t walk up and say “Hi, my security code is _____.” They say, “Hi, my name is _____.” As it stands right now we’ve had to export the registrations and dump them into a spreadsheet.

    You make a persuasive argument. I am going to talk this over with the team. I am slightly puzzled that I am unable to find anyone else who wants the same feature.

    When I originally mentioned this I did go create an account at User Voice and I thought I went through all the steps to add my suggestion.

    I am glad you did that. I have just been unable to find your suggestion. Perhaps I am not searching for the right terms. But, even so that does not bode well for other people being able to find it as well. That is why I was hoping you could dig up the link that way I could help get it more noticed — though I understand if this is too much of a hassle.

    Just keeping it real, the pace of development for this plugin is just too slow. Unless we see some major movement over the next month or two this will be our last cycle of events.

    Our development pace has admittedly slowed down the last few months. To a large extent this is premeditated and deliberate. We have been working on our processes, underlying code, and architecture. We are even hiring some new folks. This is a necessary step in order for our next big development push to be smooth and have minimal bugs.  I would love to say that we already done and we have everything ready to switch into full steam. But, realistically I think we are not quite there yet.

    It would sadden me to see you switch away. I do appreciate your feedback on our development pace, we like to keep an ear to the community about such things. If you have any other feedback let me know. Thanks for posting!

    – Brook

    #680397
    Robyn
    Participant

    I agree that check-in without the ability to sort by name/email is pretty useless. I too am surprised & disappointed at how short-siighted the check-in feature is. It’s not workable as it is. Nobody walks in with their ticket#, order#, or a printed ticket. Why should they? We are talking check-in for 100 people at a dinner, for example. I hope you find a solution for this soon.

    – Robyn

    #713912
    Brook
    Participant

    Howdy Robyn,

    Thanks for adding your feedback. At this point we know that there are two users who would like this functionality. Have you taken a look at our suggestion page? I just searched for anything with the word attendee in it. Personally I could not find a suggestion that would help with this problem. If none of those look applicable to you, please feel free to add it. That will help other users to find it and if they want the feature too then it can be prioritized higher.

    We certainly do not wish to impose any sort of rigid bureaucracy on suggesting ideas. Suggesting it on User Voice is not necessary, but it does it make it a lot more likely to get implemented. In my searching I was only able to find two people who would like this feature, you and Adam. That is out of tens of thousands of users. I hope you can understand that a feature request which only two people want is naturally going to be a bit lower priority than one that 20 people or 200 people are requesting. While popularity is not the only metric, it is obviously an important one. So if you have a couple of minutes to either vote on an existing request or add your own, please do. That will assist this in gaining traction.

    Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks guys!

    – Brook

     

    #746627
    velveeta42
    Participant

    Totally agree that this feature is useless without name/email lookup. I was surprised that this was not available, as you already have all the data to allow a user to search by name or email. Making people pull out their phones, find a confirmation email to access their order number etc when you have a line of 100 people trying to check in is unreasonable.

    I’m about to use this for the first time next week for an event and find this to be a massive fault in the functionality. Not a “nice to have” but something that is necessary to make the checkin feature usable. I too will resort to downloading the list (which DOES show name/email) and sorting alphabetically.

    #746635
    velveeta42
    Participant

    In terms of other people asking for this, here is one that has 19 votes. The problem he describes is what we are running into, but his solution is more complicated than what we’ve requested. (found by searching “checkin”)

    https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/3908573-make-it-easy-to-print-guest-lists-for-events

    #749366
    Brook
    Participant

    Thanks for pointing that out velveeta42. That does seem like the exact same problem.

    When I shared this with the team a while back my manager asked a reasonable question, “Why aren’t other people facing this problem?” To the best of our ability we were not able to find others. But your link plus this topic is helping us to understand the scope a little better. It is not that anyone thinks this would not be a nice feature enhancement, but it is more that we are trying to make sure more than a couple of people will find it useful if we are investing time.

    I am going to do my best to drive this forward. Now that we are reaching the end of the summer in which we have focused on performance and cleaning the underlying architecture, we just came up with our internal roadmap for the next few months. On it are a lot of exciting improvements to the ticketing framework. I am going to see about getting this included with those. Thanks again!

    – Brook

    #749494
    Adam
    Participant

    This reply is private.

    #749937
    Brook
    Participant

    That makes a lot of sense. This topic along with some choice quotations from it and the linked feature request have all been inserted into our ticketing system. Every release we review and prioritize those. Your argument and the others in this thread are quite persuasive to me, and I find it likely they will be to the rest of the team as well. I am happy you have taken the time to push for this, I will do my best to to carry that momentum from here.

    – Brook

    #751962
    adambowie
    Participant

    Was this ever built into the system?
    The fact that you dont have many people requesting the feature bears little weight. Most people know such requests have no immediate results – and are therefore unlikely to do this.
    To be honest, I cannot understand why this would not be done when it is such a simple fix. Its seems amazingly obvious to me to just make the change. Logic alone would dictate fixing this.

    #752136
    Adam
    Participant

    @adambowie – I’ve been saying that since January… the first time we used it at a live event was a complete embarrassment and disaster. Since then we’ve been forced to export to a spreadsheet and check people in that way.

    This and the inability to collect ticket level information (name, email address) are the two massive, gaping misses in this extension.

    #752376
    Brook
    Participant

    Adambowie, my last update about ticketing this was from 2 days ago, less than 24 hours before you posted. It would be cool if features could be built that quick! But, no, it has not reached that point yet.

    I really do not have an update for you guys. When I do I will let you know. I mentioned that we review these tickets at the beginning of every release. So, it could be a little bit before any plans are made, though we are nearing the end of another release cycle.

    – Brook

    #753109
    Rob
    Member

    Hi folks! Thanks for jumping in and offering up your feedback – I see some long-term customers and new faces alike in this thread. Thanks a ton for sharing your experiences. We’ve obviously let you all down here, and my apologies on behalf of the whole team for the disappointment so far. It’s clear that you guys have a set of expectations from this plugin, and that we’ve failed to deliver on those. What this plugin currently does and how it was developed to behave is not in line with what this subset of the community is requesting. Clearly that’s a due to a lack of both communication and properly setting expectations on our end. We apologize – and thank you for helping us get better.

    That said, I’m a tad concerned at what I see as a questionable use of the forum here. We generally keep SUPPORT and FEATURE REQUESTS separate: support is what’s given here on the forum, to help users troubleshoot problems and smooth out integration issues. Feature requests – no matter how “must have” a feature is to a certain users or “useless” the plugin is without it – need to stick to UserVoice. We’ve got someone monitoring UV and prioritizing features based on what comes through. But the forum is not the right place to complain about missing functionality or to give the support team grief over the fact that our development cycle isn’t moving quickly enough. Some of the comments in here are downright hostile or are at least are ignoring certain realities of the plugin development cycle. There’s no reason for anyone to get angry – the stakes aren’t so high that someones life or physical well-being is at risk, nor for that matter are the support members here on the forum in any way responsible for the decision not advance this feature sooner. Remember that if you want an “out” in the form of a refund – to keep blood pressures down and hostilities to a minimum – one remains on the table so you can leave at any time. While it’d be a bummer to lose you guys as customers, I suspect there are competing plugins out there with functionality that is more in line with your expectations – or who will turn around new feature requests in a more timely fashion than our release cycle allows. I’d be happy to do some research and direct you each towards one if that’d be helpful.

    As Brook noted, we’ve got a ton of users working with this plugin at the moment. While some variation on this feature is widely requested on UserVoice, we should keep perspective: the majority of customers using this plugin have made do without the functionality being requested. Remember that WooCommerce Tickets isn’t designed or pitched as a full-on event management system…it’s merely tacking onto WooCommerce and TEC to add tickets to your events. While we’re working to take it more in the direction you guys are requesting – I can say with certainty that we watch UserVoice to prioritize features accordingly, and that this is one of the handful of new features for tickets that’s actively being worked on which will ship over once they are done/pass code review/QA – I also want to stress that this isn’t exactly how the plugin was designed in the first place. To that end I caution against comments like “this should have been included from the offset” or “this plugin is useless without the functionality,” as I’m not really sure what grounds someone has to make a statement like that. We had a specific vision in mind when designing this plugin; it’s worked for most of the people who have purchased it; and for those it hasn’t, we’re taking their feedback and working with it to the extent we can. If anyone has thoughts on how we could have done this more gracefully or better communicated our progress to you guys, I welcome them. I suspect that’d help save other users your disappointment down the line.

    Adam, your points are solid and I know you’ve been struggling with certain aspects of this plugin for a while. Thanks again for sticking around to offer up your perspectives. The comment you made about people walking up and giving their name is perhaps ignoring a key aspect of how this plugin is meant to operate, though: namely, where is their ticket? Every ticket goes out via email and attendees are expected to use those. Presumably they will be handing the person at the event door said ticket; that ticket will have the security ID; and that can be cross-referenced. Have you considered taking this approach? Or is there a reason why it wouldn’t work? I’d be interested in hearing more simply because this seems like one key functionality here – the tickets themselves – isn’t being used. That’s not really now the plugin is intended to work. And as a result I could definitely foresee logistical challenges.

    I should reiterate: the attendee data functionality being requested is absolutely something that’s on our roadmap. We’d be fools not to listen to such a vocal subset of our userbase on something like this. It is being worked on, though it isn’t as simple/easy a fix as some users who perhaps aren’t as intimately familiar with our codebase might suggest. It’s not something I feel comfortable giving a specific timeline for, nor – unless I’m mistaken – is it something we claim in any of our pre-purchase marketing material to offer at this time. I’d appreciate a heads up or a link if there’s anything we’ve put out suggesting to the contrary. I’ll also reiterate the offer that if folks aren’t happy with the current implementation or the speed with which we release maintenance updates, the offer for a full refund stands. If I continue to get word that the team is dealing with these types of criticisms I may end up reaching out to some of you personally via email about whether it makes sense to continue this relationship at all.

    All that to say: I’m sorry we let you down. Your concerns are valid and we’ve heard them. If you have additional ideas, thoughts, complaints or requests on this topic those should be brought to me via email (rob @ this domain) so we can flush them out and try and get you in a good spot in the short-term. But I’m closing this thread to prevent further discussion – there isn’t really a ton else to say here and I worry it’d just degrade further. I welcome your feedback via email and appreciate all you’ve offered up so far.

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