Timezones are drunk

[tunatraffic]

Hi All,

We are creating events on ohlardy.com (the license is under their email as well). The site is setup in CST and our eventbrite account is in CST.

But when we post the event to eventbrite the start time is 5 hours behind on eventbrite. So if on the site it’s 8am, its showing up at 3am on eventbrite.

Any thoughts on how we can debug this a big?

[George]

Hey Mike,

Nice thread title 🙂 I’m sorry it’s related to some actual problems on your site though, and hopefully we can sort things out here.

The first thing I’m curious about is if you’re able to reset the times after importing them into Eventbrite – in other words, before “Publishing” the event onto Eventbrite.com, are you still able to tweak the times so that they’re accurate? I’m just curious because if you can do this, then we at least have a “backup” solution for the time being so that you can keep using the plugin if you need to.

Now, ideally, it’ll work automatically. There are some known and hard-to-resolve issues with Eventbrite’s timezone syncing, unfortunately, but one place we can start is with your WordPress site’s timezone settings. You mention that it’s already set up to CST – how exactly did you set this? If you did it properly, in Settings > General in your admin, then I have an odd request for you: in the timezones option, there will be a lot of numerical timezones (like “UTC+7”, “UTC-4”, etc.), but there will also be “Named” timezones, related to cities in a given region (like “Bogota”, “New York”, etc.) – did you set your current timezone to the numerical type? If so, does changing it to the “Named” equivalent make any difference with your issues here?

[tunatraffic]

Hi George.

The time stays accurate on the post. After I save it as a draft, we add the ticket info and then click publish. When we check on eventbrite, the time zones are wrong

I have the time zone set in WP settings to Chicago. Should I try setting to UTC in the WP settings?

[George]

Hey Mike,

No need to adjust your settings – this sounds like just the default functionality of things, which is a known problem/conflict that many users want fixed. It’s been on our radar for quite some time. Here’s a breakdown of the problem:

Unfortunately all events default to the current WP time zone, and this cannot be changed on a per-event basis.

When you import an event from Eventbrite you are taken to the draft event page. This is where you would want to correct any incorrect dates that have resulted from time zone differences. Simply go down to the start/end time and correct them. We know this is a bit of a pain, and have been working on / debating possible solutions, but there are limitations because of the way the Eventbrite API works and how we integrate with it (and how the event times/dates are stored, and used for plotting on the events on the calendar itself, etc.)

We’re working on a good solid way to automatically convert Eventbrite event timezones to the WP timezone you have setup upon import.

I’m sorry for the current limitations, but hopefully this clarifies the situation – at least you know nothing is “broken”, per se, just…not ideally configured.

Please let us know what your thoughts are about this, and if there’s anything else we can help with for this thread. I work personally on the Facebook on Eventbrite add-ons, and there are many improvements we have slated to add over time. This feature is among the most important one we want to implement!

Thanks for your patience,
George

[tunatraffic]

This makes sense. It’s an extra step for my customer right now, but at least its a known issue that you guys are aware of.

I’ll follow the change log.

Any way to get email updates of what’s slated for the next release or what makes it in a release?

[George]

Hey Mike,

Thanks for being understanding about the [current, temporary] limitation – as for staying up-to-date with releases, unfortunately the only way is to check for updates manually on your site. But before actually updating, you can check the changelog of the release before clicking “update”. 🙂

I hope that’s helpful!

Cheers,
George

[Support Droid]

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