Lots of issues with importing from EventBrite

[Jon]

I am having LOADS of issues importing events from EventBrite. If someone could help me out, I really need them resolved as they are causing issues!

First of all, when I import an event, it doesn’t open as a draft, it is immediately published, which I think is strange. It’s especially annoying because during the import, it causes changes to my EventBrite event that we DO NOT want to happen.

#1- time zone changes. My wordpress (under Settings > General) is set to Los Angeles time ( I also tried UTC – 700) and so are my EventBrite events, but as soon as I import to wordpress, the eventbrite listing changes to 7 hours earlier (so from 7pm to 12pm). That makes no sense to me and I don’t know how to fix it since both should be operating out of the same time zone.

#2- importing / publishing events changes our ticket settings – normally we have all our events NOT showing the # of remaining tickets. When I import an event, that box gets automatically checked for some reason and now all our events that have been imported show remaining tickets even though I don’t want them to.

#3 – share settings changes – normally on EventBrite all our events would have social sharing ENABLED, but when we import an event, this option gets UNCHECKED somehow by your plugin. We need our original settings to stay the same!

#4 – THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT – as soon as an event is imported into our wordpress site, some setting with eventbrite that I didn’t even know existed gets put into place where that event gets set to Private, so you can only buy tickets if you have a password! That is TERRIBLE! So now if we want to show an event on our website, we have to import it, then go back to EventBrite, change all 4 settings (time zone, sharing, # of remaining tickets settings, and spend some time trying to make the event tickets public again)

As it is right now this is unacceptable and we can no longer use it unless these get resolved!

Thank you,

Jessie

[Jon]

As aside note, you should also WARN people that even after events are loaded into wordpress they are still TOTALLY linked to EventBrite, so any edits you make to titles or text will be made in EventBrite. we were hoping that we could display things a little differently without effecting both, but oh well. i wish it was just a one-way street where we were just GETTING info from EventBrite, not SENDING it back. any way to do that?

[Nico]

Hi Jessie,

Thanks for reaching out and also for the detailed report on each of your issues. Really sorry to hear you are having so much trouble setting this up 🙁 I’m here to help, and want to do whatever we can to make things right.

Most probably some of these issues are coming from a conflict between our products and other plugins or with the active theme. If you can, please follow the steps outlined in our Testing for conflicts guide. Also to get quicker and more detailed answers I’ll need you to create separate threads for issues #2, #3 and #4 – when doing so please include a link back to this post and if possible answer the follow-up questions I provide for each one. This way the issues can be addressed simultaneously by different team members. I’ll continue to help you with #1 in this thread.

Let me give you a quick overview on each issue:

#1 – This is a byproduct of how the plugins currently handle timezone conversion (its converting the time on import to match WordPress settings). There isn’t a short-term solution, but the release we’re about to ship adds a feature

that makes timezone conversion optional in EventBrite. It’s coming out next week so if you can hold out until then it will be great.
If you are interested in getting access to an early “beta” of the upcoming release just let me know and I’ll hook you up.

#2 – I’m struggling to recreate this on my end, and nobody else on the team seems able to either. Maybe it’s a bug we are not aware of.
Please confirm is this is still happening after testing for conflicts.

#3 – Not sure if I clearly understand what’s happening here. Our plugin doesn’t include social sharing out-of-the-box, there’s a Knowledge base article on <a href=”https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/adding-social-media-

sharing-to-events/” target=”_blank”>Adding Social Media Sharing to Events you might want to check.
When yo say “…when we import an event, this option gets UNCHECKED somehow…”: Do you mean the option “Include links to Facebook and Twitter” in EventBrite gets unset? Or just no social sharing options are showing up

in the WordPress event page? Are you using any social sharing plugin in your site and that’s not working as expected with imported events?

#4 – This sounds like a serious concern. That said, this is the first report we’ve seen of it — and I’d think if there was a problem in the codebase this would be a fairly common report.
Please confirm is this is still happening after testing for conflicts. If so please provide any particular steps / settings to help us reproduce this on our end.

Thank you for the patience and time this process requires. I hope we can help get this sorted for you very shortly.,
Best,
Nico

[Jon]

Ok – I will leave this open for issue #1 – the timezone thing. I understand that your plugin converts time zones, but they are THE SAME TIME ZONE. why would it convert a time that is set to the same time zone as it’s source? How does this work for anybody at all? It’s totally crazy!

[Jon]

Nico, I would LOVE to test out the beta if that means it might fix at least one of these issues.

[Nico]

This reply is private.

[Jon]

What do you mean it worked as expected? How can I set up my timezone so it doesn’t mess everything up?

[Nico]

Jessie,

What do you mean it worked as expected? How can I set up my timezone so it doesn’t mess everything up?

To test this issue, I configured the Event timezone in EventBrite (please check out this article if you are not sure how to do it) to match my WP timezone (you can check that in ‘WP Admin > General’). With the same timezone for both I proceed to import the event. After this I checked my Event in EventBrite, and the date was unchanged, also checked on the imported event and ‘Start Date & Time’ and ‘End Date & Time’ where successfully imported. That’s what I meant with ‘work as expected’.

Does this makes sense? Would you like to try it again with EventBrite 3.9 making sure both settings match?

Best,
Nico

[Jon]

Our eventBrite settings are for Pacific Standard Time. Here you can see our settings: http://imgur.com/dA623tH

My wordpress site, is also set to Pacific Time – i tried changing it to UTC – 700 AND Los Angeles time (http://imgur.com/S3AkkyG), which are the same really. Both times, when I import a new event, the time zone in WordPress gets set to the correct time, but as soon as I make any changes to the WP post and click Update (in WordPress), the EventBrite event’s time changes to -7hours (so from 7pm to 12pm).

Im not making it up. And I have tried many times. It sucks to test it because it changes our live events and that’s a bummer.

[Jon]

Here is what our event says before we import it into your plugin:

View post on imgur.com

Here we have it imported into wordpress:

View post on imgur.com

And after I added a single space into the title, and clicked Update in WordPress, I went back to EventBrite and lo and behold, the time is magically changed to the wrong time – 7 hours earlier:

View post on imgur.com

It changes the other things too, like I talked about before but I guess I will save those for the other threads… Sigh…

[Geoff]

Hi Jessie,

We’ve met before and I just wanted to chime in here because Nico brought this thread to my attention.

I definitely believe you here and want you to know that we’re looking into this as actively as you are. So sorry for any miscommunication here that would suggest otherwise.

This is indeed an issue–we just need to dig a little deeper to figure out why the time is changing in Eventbrite the way it is when the event is updated in WordPress. We see the issue in the current release as well the upcoming 3.10, so it’s definitely not a figment of your imagination. In fact, I imagine others will find this frustrating as well, so i’m glad you brought it up.

I’m sorry I don’t have a solid solution for you here yet, but we are definitely looking into it. It’s been ticketed in our system and is on our radar.

I know this thread has seen a lot of back and forth and I appreciate the patience you’ve given us so far as we figure this out. At the same time, I know the frustration that comes with the expectation that something should work the way it’s supposed to. I’d like to offer you a full refund in case that’s something you’d prefer to do at this point. While it would be a bummer to lose you as a customer, I want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to do right by you here. Of course, we’d love to have you stay while we work on this with you, but just want to let you know that’s on the table.

Thanks again for reaching out and sorry again for any crossed wires. Nico will continue to keep you posted here in this thread as we make progress on the issue, but please do let us know if you have any questions.

Cheers,
Geoff

[Jon]

Thanks Geoff,

I appreciate knowing that I’m not crazy or missing something here. I just don’t understand how to make it work. And somehow my other issues are just “un-recreatable”, but I really am having them and I wish someone would just go through it with me and figure out where the problem is. Is it my host? Do I need to uninstall and re-install all the plugins? Is there something weird with my wordpress install? We really really like the idea of your plugin as it does so much for us, and the EventBrite API plugin is pretty wonky in comparison and heavy on load times. I like that all the data for your plugin gets stored locally, but if we can’t get it to work then yes, I would love a refund. Would prefer to get it figured out though. Can I just give someone admin access or something? I want to get this sorted ASAP.

[Geoff]

Hi Jessie,

Do you feel like the issue here in this thread — timezone conversions — is under control and that we’re all on the same page as far as next steps? There’s nothing wrong with your host or anything on your end. It’s a bug on our end that we need to address and ship a fix. That’s first and foremost what I want to make sure gets resolved in this particular thread.

If I’m hearing you correctly, then it sounds like we’ve let you down in the other threads. Are you not getting the help you’re asking for? In looking over those threads, I see that Barry has reported one as a replicated bug and is working with you on another one with additional testing steps. The other two involve a customization that we unfortunately can’t support and the feature request you and I covered. Is there anything in there we’re missing? I see that each of those threads are pending a reply from you, so please let us know in those threads and we will certainly do our best to help you in any way we possibly can.

If you have any additional questions here regarding the timezone conversions, then Nico will pick it up from here and keep you posted as we make progress on that fix. Otherwise, we’ll look forward to hearing from you in the other threads and are ready to help out.

Thanks again for working with us through all this!

Geoff

[Jon]

Hey Geoff,

I don’t really feel like it’s under control because it’s still happening and I don’t have any kind of timeline of when it will work. Same with my other 3 issues. I am glad that these two have been marked as ‘known bugs’ but I have no idea how long I will have to wait for them to be worked out. The feature request and customization are way less critical and I wasn’t referring to those in this thread at all. So far just getting these issues recognized / tested has taken a lot of time, but like I said, I don’t see many alternatives out there with EventBrite’s API so I am sticking it out hoping we can make it work.

[Nico]

Hi Jessie,

Thanks for your patience on this once again, I was waiting to have some solid news before replying.

A member of the dev team started working on a hotfix for this today. It will be packed as a plugin so you can use it right away and don’t have to wait until next release is out. I can’t give you a specific date for this, but I hope it will be ready in the upcoming days.

Best,
Nico

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