Timezones Appear Incorrectly on Eventbrite

[Emily Thompson]

Hi,

We use Eventbrite Tickets to send our Events Calendar events (originally created in WordPress) to Eventbrite. The event times appear correctly in WordPress, but the timezones automatically switch from UTC-8 (Pacific Standard Time) to AKST (Alaska Standard Time) as soon as the events reach Eventbrite, shifting the start and end times one hour earlier.

The local time appears as UTC-8 and reads correctly in our WordPress General settings. The timezone also appears correctly as UTC-8 in the event post body.

Please help! We obviously want our event times to sync correctly to Eventbrite without having to manually reset all of them.

[Cliff]

Hi Rebecca. Sorry for the delayed reply on this ticket. I hope to help you resolve your issue as quickly as possible.

1)

Do you have a URL I could visit on your site and also the URL to the event on Eventbrite?

2)

Would you mind grabbing your system information and pasting it here? Make sure to use the “Set as private reply” checkbox to protect your private information from the public.

You can find the system info by going to WP Admin > Events > Settings, clicking on the “Help” tab, and scrolling down to the “System Information” box. (Or by going to [yoursite]/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=tribe_events&page=tribe-events-calendar&tab=help)

That will give me a lot of extra information to help diagnose the problem.

[Emily Thompson]

This reply is private.

[Cliff]

Thanks for the info. I see your WordPress timezone is not set.

Would it be okay for you to set that to your preferred/default timezone?

[Emily Thompson]

Hi Cliff,

Hmm, the timezone is set correctly on the WordPress backend. In Settings: General Settings, under Timezone, it reads:
“Timezone: UTC-8”

The time appears accurately immediately afterwards:
“UTC time is 2015-11-13 00:04:23 Local time is 2015-11-12 16:04:23”

I do see that the timezone doesn’t register in the Modern Tribe report. I resaved the timezone settings, to double-check, and this value still shows up in the Modern Tribe report as null:
WORDPRESS TIMEZONE –

Any ideas? Thanks!

[Cliff]

Rebecca,

We figured out the “Help” report doesn’t pull manual offset timezones correctly. I’m not certain if that has anything to do with your Eventbrite issue though.

Could you please select “Los Angeles” (or another city of your choosing in Pacific Time, if that’s your correct timezone) at wp-admin > Settings > General and see if this fixes Eventbrite’s syncing?

I’m hoping it will because it’s only off by 1 hour.

When you select a manual offset timezone (e.g. UTC-8), it’ll ALWAYS be 8 hours behind UTC.

UTC does not observe daylight savings, but your local time does. So sometimes the correct offset is -8 hours and sometimes it’s -7 hours. That’s why I always recommend choosing a city/location and not a manual offset.

So please test and we’ll go from there.

Thanks!

[Emily Thompson]

Hi Cliff,

The timezone on our WordPress backend was set to “Los Angeles” back before November 5, when I submitted the first ticket. I changed the timezone to UTC-8 to see if that would affect the timezone issue on Eventbrite, which, it didn’t.

However, changing the timezone back to “Los Angeles” in the General Settings panel appears to have resolved the problem! The event times are now displaying correctly in Eventbrite for events originally created in WordPress.

Mysterious! But, I’ll take it. Hopefully the same glitch won’t pop up again in the future.

[Cliff]

Thanks for testing and for letting me know. Who knows — maybe it was something fixed in our recent maintenance release… either way, I’m glad to hear it!

[Author]

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