Updating WordPress event changes Eventbrite timezone

[Frederick W. Chapman]

I’m using Eventbrite Tickets 1.0.3 with The Events Calendar 2.0.9 (free version) and WordPress 3.4.2. In Settings > General, my WordPress timezone is set to New York.

When I update an event in WordPress, it changes the timezone in Eventbrite to Atlantic Standard Time (AST), which is UTC-4. The problem is that this happens for events scheduled to take place in November through January, which occur during Eastern Standard Time (EST), or UTC-5. Updating in WordPress also changes the Eventbrite timezone to AST for events scheduled to take place in March and May of next year, which occur during Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), or UTC-4. I want to use EST and EDT, as appropriate, for my Eventbrite timezones. I don’t want to use AST at all.

I realize that timezone issues have been reported by others before, but I wanted to provide some additional data for you. Please let me know if you need more information to investigate the problem.

Thanks for anything you can do to fix this.

Fred Chapman

[Barry]

Thanks Fred. I’ve put this problem to our developers (our reference is #18402) and hopefully we can sort something out here.

[Frederick W. Chapman]

Thank you, Barry! I appreciate all your help. -Fred

[Barry]

No problem – we’ll leave this open and I’ll update you as soon as I hear something back: however, realistically there could be a delay of some days before we get to that point.

We totally appreciate your patience and continued support.

[Barry]

Hi Fred, so one of the problems here is that WordPress has far wider support for timezones than does Eventbrite and broadly speaking we would need to introduce code that mediates between the two.

We’re hoping to get something together which should be delivered in a future maintenance release – so though I can’t really provide even a rough timeline for this it is definitely on the radar and for the time being all I can suggest is manually correcting events.

[Frederick W. Chapman]

Barry, thanks very much for letting me know what you have in the works to address this issue. In the mean time, I can manually correct the timezones on individual events as the need arises.

Thanks again for everything!

All the best,

Fred

[Barry]

Not at all – and thanks for bringing this to our attention 🙂

[Manuel]

Hi Leah,

The timezone bug in your eventbrite plugin is a serious problem. It can be easily reproduced. I just did 3 times in a row.

1. Create an event on eventbrite on PST
2. Go to WordPress and import Event. Select USA and CAlifornia.
3. Publish the event
4. Go back to Eventbrite. The timezone of event is changed to WET. Events are closed 9 hours before start.

This is a problem in your end. Pleas advise asap. We need to launch this page and this makes it impossible.

[Manuel]

Hi Barry, you know we already reported this also, I see other people are running into it now. Anyway, for us as a mid size presenting organization, changing dozens of events manually is not really an option. But this is serious and you guys should lets all users know publicly about the bug because closing sales for a big event can result in thousands of dollars loss for the venue. Evenbrite knows by now (we have talked with their tech people trying to track it down) that this is coming from the Modern Tribe plugin so they are not responsible for any damages caused by the premature closing of events.

[Barry]

Hi Manuel, we do accept that this is a problem – we’ve been able to reproduce it ourselves – and for that reason are treating it as a bug which will be fixed in a future release.

As with all software systems of any complexity bugs are an unfortunate reality and we deal with them as quickly as we reasonably can and in as open and transparent manner as we can: for instance, this forum is publicly searchable and many or most prospective users do their due diligence by looking across the threads to get a sense for how things are handled and what problems might exist.

In the case of your particular scenario what I can say is that I can create an event running at a given time (PST) and import it, then publish changes (from a test site set to UTC-8) without the time changing on Eventbrite.

That’s not to say you aren’t encountering a real and valid problem, just that it may be possible to workaround this (in specific cases like yours) without the need for manual adjustment.

[Impact Hub]

Hello,
It looks like I too am experiencing this issue. Were there any further developments on this problem since the last response?

Currently using:
The Events Calendar – 2.0.11
Events Calendar Pro – 2.0.10
Eventbrite Addon – 1.0.4

[Jonah]

Hi Bobby,

My suggestion would be to try updating to the 3.0 version of all the plugins to see if this helps. If possible, do it in a development environment as there are lots of changes in 3.0 and it would be good to review all the changes in a test environment first before you deploy the changes on the live site. Let me know how that goes.

[smallmammothdesign]

Hi,
I’m using the 3.0 version, and am still experiencing this issue — events created in Eventbrite with an EDT time zone were all updated to Mountain time after I imported them into WordPress.

Any chance for a fix on this?

[smallmammothdesign]

I should also note that not all of my events are in the same time zone, so if the time zone can somehow be set using the general WordPress settings, that won’t do the trick for me. There should either be a set timezone option on each event page, as there is in Eventbrite, or the timezone should be set according to the address.

[Kelly]

Hi, smallmammothdesign. I’m sorry that your question fell through the cracks here.

We’re putting the finishing touches on a fix that should be out in an upcoming release. That will eliminate the issues with the wrong time zone being passed through to Eventbrite.

As far as separate time zones for individual events goes, you are welcome to suggest it as a feature in our User Voice forum. I would caution you though, that there may not be a way to implement that because of how restrictive the Eventbrite API is.

I’m going to close this thread now, but please feel free to start a new topic if there’s anything else we can do. Thanks for being a TEC user!

[Author]

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