Time Zone Problem!

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Uh oh. When we feed events in my Facebook profile if the organizer has not specified a time zone, the default time zone is UTC — Greenwich!. This is very bad. It is creating a 7 hour time error on many of our events.

I would like to specify the default time zone for all our events. Used to be able to do this. Where is that now?

Thanks.

Carolyn

[Barry]

Hi!

The site-wide timezone is configured in WordPress’s own General Settings screen. You can then visit the General Settings screen for Events (ie, Events ‣ Settings ‣ General) and scroll down to the timezone section and configure events specifically.

However, I don’t think this will solve your problem. If the source event on Facebook is set to UTC, in the best case it would simply be converted to your local timezone, whatever that might be.

Incidentally, I’m curious as recent changes to the Facebook platform have caused issues for many: are you finding imports are continuing to work for you without any issue?

Thanks!

[Citizen LocalMotive]

We are still able to import the events we mark Interested in on our personal profile.  So that is how we are building our calendar now.  It is a little more work as we have to manually visit the events pages of our participants and mark the events — but it works. 

I was hoping to automate the process with a python script. But I see the events pages have a div class called uiProfileBlockContent.  It appears nothing  inside that div can be scraped.  Too bad.  I guess that’s how their privacy policy is implemented. 

  I sure hope they loosen up and create some kind of permission system.  Do you suppose they are open to feedback?  It really is draconian that they did not alloe any mechanism for giving permission to share events.  Our organizations want to have their events on our calendar.  Plus we can’t even feed events in from our own page.  Seems like they would have let us at least feed our own page.

⁣Sent from Blue ​

[Barry]

Interesting to hear, it’s seemed (based on feedback from others) that not everyone is able to import, even after marking themselves interested in an event. We’ll poke at this further 🙂

I’d certainly like to hope they are open to feedback and would encourage all users who’d like to see a change to reach out to them directly (though we’ve been in touch with them ourselves, I imagine it could be useful for them to hear from others, too).

Coming back to your core issue re timezones, we can’t control the way timezones are set for individual events (on Facebook), but it is potentially possible to modify event start/end dates and times (and other things) immediately after import. Of course, this is not risk-free as some events may legitimately be described using UTC.

Here is some sample code written for a different user that may be of interest:

https://gist.github.com/barryhughes/c6772a49c1f561caf528e1fc05903327

Note that in that specific case, it targets imports for a specific iCal feed, but could potentially be modified to work against all imports or just Facebook imports, etc.

I’d love to work with you further on this and help you to tweak it (though I have the impression you may be more than capable of this yourself), but we’re really in custom dev territory here which is typically beyond what we can assist with and, on our side, we haven’t had even the same limited level of success with Facebook imports that you yourself have had.

I hope that helps, though, if only as a starting point 🙂

[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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