[Rob]

Hi Thomas. Rob from Modern Tribe here; I head up the support team and wanted to thank you for your note on this – Barry brought it to my attention and I felt I should reply to let you know we take your feedback very seriously. It was by no means our intention to deceive you and I’m sorry you feel that way upon using the plugin…that isn’t how we do business and it’s a major failing on our end to leave a new customer feeling the way you are right now. Let me say upfront that we apologize for letting you down.

The WooTickets release that is currently available, and which you’ve installed on your site, is a fairly “young” product – we released the 1.0 build just a few months ago and obviously didn’t intend on that being a finished product. This is a living plugin we are continuing to modify and build out. As you noted, one of the main features lacking in 1.0 was the fact that recurrence isn’t supported. We are working to incorporate that, to be sure, but at this point it’s tied to the broader 3.0 release for The Events Calendar / PRO, which is a major update we’ve been working on and which will have implications for all the add-ons (including WooTickets). While we’re not doing monthly release cycles for each plugin (like we were previously) during this 3.0 push, we believe the end result – an improved Events plugin with a more functional stable of add-ons, coming in the next couple months – will be an improvement for everyone, and is worth the hold up on smaller releases in the interim.

There is no excuse for our failure to be more clear in documenting this, though. After Barry brought your note to my attention I added a note about this lacking functionality to both the WooTickets product page (https://theeventscalendar.com/wordpress-wootickets/) and our new user primer for the plugin (https://theeventscalendar.com/support/documentation/wootickets-new-user-primer/) so that others will not face your same frustrations down the road. If you have feedback on that or think my wording needs to be stronger, please let me know.

With regards to your problem in the short-term: we are obviously happy to refund you the purchase price of WooTickets and anything else you’ve bought, no questions asked, since we let you down on this end. Also seems fair to give you a discount coupon for use in the future, should you be willing to give the plugin another shot once we’ve got its featureset up to your liking. Lastly if we can do anything to help offset the time you’ve wasted on this so far, let us know and we’ll try to help.

Email us (pro /a/ tri.be) a copy of your receipt to get the refund taken care of. If you have any other feedback, comments, questions or concerns about our support process that you’d rather not share here at the forum, please don’t hesitate to email me directly (rob /a/ tri.be) and we can continue the discussion. I want to make sure – above all else – we do right by you on this end.

Thanks again for your feedback and patience so far.

[Rob]

Hey Andrew. Thanks for the follow-up, and for your willingness to work with us on this – closing the forum on your criticism was definitely a failing on our end, and I can see how you’d be bummed to see that (as it’s effectively shutting down discussion one doesn’t agree with). This isn’t our practice as a team and we’ve reiterated that internally just to make sure we’re all on the same page to keep it from happening down the road.

Just to keep you cued in on what we’re doing for this particular issue: we contacted WPEngine on Twitter yesterday, and they opened up additional avenues of contact based on our exchange there. Barry (who will continue driving this issue forward for you) has reached out to the WPEngine team today through their official support system and – once he’s laid the groundwork – we’ll bring our core dev team on the plugin in as well.

We suspect the problem here is that their transparent caching solution causes our template tags to dynamically display messages like “This event is passed”, especially with our pages being ‘virtual’. (This would also explain why we haven’t been able to recreate the problem locally yet). As we have seen a few variations on what is now looking to be the same source problem, fixing this would be a win for all involved: WPEngine, Modern Tribe and customers like yourself.

Based on the outcome of today’s exchange with WPEngine, Barry will keep you posted this afternoon and going into Monday. If you find things not moving at a pace you’re comfortable with or have any concerns at all, please do email me directly (rob at tri.be) so I can check on progress and keep this moving or get clarification from the team as needed.

That work for you? Let me know if not, or if there are other concerns I’ve not addressed here. Thanks again for your patience and support on this, as well as for your overall willingness to give us another shot at working through this with you.

[Rob]

Hey Cliff. Thanks for your feedback here, and for taking the time to write this note. We do sincerely appreciate this and take your concerns seriously. I know how it feels to pay for something and find yourself having to fix aspects that you’d expect fully functional.

Just to cue you in on our process, specifically regarding 3.0: we made a conscious decision towards the end of 2012 that we’d forego our monthly maintenance releases for a few months – except in situations where it was critical, ie a showstopping bug impacting everyone – so that we could power through and overhaul the plugin for 3.0. We realize this means not fixing smaller bugs in as timely a fashion as we’d been doing previously, but this was a tradeoff we felt worth it for the ultimate payoff of 3.0 and the general stability improvements & added functionality users will receive when it’s out.

In the interim, we’ve been focusing on helping users through custom patches or code snippets that can work for them instead of actual releases. We’ve found that for many users we’re able to provide a solution that works as a stopgap, but that’s not the case for every situation. I can say right off the bat that of the ones you noted:

* https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/problem-updating-recurring-events/ is fixed with 3.0 and I’ve tested as much to verify this.
* https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/after-deleting-recurring-event-instance-editing-all-future-recreates-them/ hasn’t been fully finalized, but is in the works to be fixed for the initial 3.0 release.

While we don’t have an official launch date for 3.0, we have a fairly stable beta right now that I’d be happy to let you try to see if it better met your needs (and so you could have confidence the official release was worth waiting around for). Alternatively, we’re planning on having an official round 2 beta over the coming weeks that I could save you a spot in. Or, as a third option, I can just get a dev to focus on any specific issues you’ve got logged to do our best to provide a workaround (even if it means going deeper than we generally do on forum threads…I want to do right by you here). No guarantees we’d be able to offer one, but if there’s something you’re waiting on that is becoming a pain point for your clients, I want to do whatever we can to resolve that.

Let me know what’s best – feel free to shoot me an email (rob at tri.be) if you’d prefer to take the discussion out of the forums, and I’ll get you what you need. We truly appreciate your support and are sorry that we’ve kept you waiting so far.

[Rob]

Hi Andrew. Thanks for the note here. Please know we do take your feedback (and any feedback like this) very seriously. I know how it feels to have a live site where problems are occurring and feeling the pressure to get that sorted as quickly as possible. It sucks, and we do feel your pain on that end. Barry & the support team do their best to help in whatever capacity we as Modern Tribe can. But we also try to set expectations early that – as a small team providing support for multiple plugins – we generally cannot provide immediate support, and require up to 24-hours between replies while we review internally and involve developers from the team as needed.

It’s worth noting that as this problem isn’t a widespread issue with the plugin, it’s tougher for us to both identify the cause and identify/provide a solution that’s going to work. This is something we’ve not seen a lot of reports on and are unable to recreate ourselves – and so while we definitely offer code snippets when we can (and do in a good number of the threads on this forum), the particular problem you’ve reported here unfortunately doesn’t have as straightforward a solution. That said, we are committed to helping you out here and remain happy to work through this with you.

I would disagree with a few of your points, namely the response time issue…as reviewing both this thread and others you posted, I see the team has gotten back to virtually every comment you’ve left within a reasonable amount of time (and often far less than 24-hours from original posting). I’m also a bit confused as to your claim that our team doesn’t “actively help when there are issues”, as I just reviewed all the threads you’ve posted since becoming a customer and saw – on the ones where you actually followed-up to the support team members’ responses – a resolution provided in almost every case.

All that said, we apologize if we let you down. It is absolutely understandable that you or your clients would want a solution with more on-demand support, and I’ll acknowledge outright that’s not us (nor is that something that would be feasible to provide for a $50 plugin). If you’re willing to work through this with us over the next couple days, we will do our best to get this sorted. But if not, best of luck finding a new solution and moving forward with your project. If you have any other feedback or suggestions for how our team could improve that you’d rather not share on the forum – please do feel free to email me directly (rob at tri.be).

[Rob]

Hey Antonio, thanks for the note and for your feedback on this. We greatly appreciate when people take the time to relay their thoughts on the product and how it is or isn’t working for you, and I can understand your frustration on this end.

I would take issue with your comment that the plugin “does not achieve what it is intended to be delivering,” though. As you may be aware, the timezone issue – where events import to WP in Pacific Standard Time – is entirely a Facebook issue and unfortunately something we as plugin developers have no control over. FB sets it how they want it, and we take what we can get via their API. By providing the solution above, we’ve just tried to go the extra mile to fix a bug in Facebook’s API (which according to Facebook’s TRAC system, they’ve been aware of for a while). While we definitely can understand your position, we hope you’ll understand ours too: mainly that there are limits to what we can do when it comes to “fixing” problems with a third-party service.

Based on your note above, it sounds like you haven’t imported anything yet – and if you apply this patch and then import, it should work 100%. The tweak will not impact any events you’ve already imported (ie cannot work retroactively), as that would have a big chance of screwing up date info. If you want to cycle through previously imported events and update the dates you could do so, but do it at your own risk (as it could update events that have the correct date/time already displayed).

Let me know your thoughts in light of the above. While we generally do not give refunds due to a problem with a third-party service, I want to do right by you…so if you feel one is fair please email me (rob /a/ tri.be) and we can take care of it. Thanks again for your understanding and patience so far.

[Rob]

Hey Paul. Just wanted to follow-up on this, as we’ve been talking about it as a group a bit today. Since two of the three users in this thread found it fixed by retrying, I’m wondering if the auto-update hasn’t triggered on your end so far.

Did the manual update get you sorted? If not, what happens when you try going into Dashboard -> Updates, and hitting the manual “Check again” option (might require a few attempts, and will likely require a cache clearing as well)?

[Rob]

Hey Emu: just a heads up that, as Sam mentioned above, we released an update to Events/PRO today (2.0.11) which should have addressed your issue specifically. Let us know the results and if you’re still having trouble upon updating.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and for your patience so far!

[Rob]

Hey Lawrence. Just a heads up that we released an update to Events/PRO today (2.0.11) which should have addressed your issue specifically. Let us know the results and if you’re still having trouble upon updating.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and for your patience so far!

[Rob]

Hey Chris. Thanks for the note here, and for your early purchase of WooTickets. This was something we intentionally left out of the plugin based on feedback we’d received during the UX tests and beta sessions; that being said, since you’re requesting it (and this is only the second support thread on day 2 of the plugin’s lifecycle) we may want to re-evaluate that. I’ve logged a ticket for the team to see what can be done about enabling this option for an upcoming release.

In the interim, our dev Daniel proposed a workaround that should accomplish this nicely for you…just do a template override and you will be set.

In your theme folder, create (if it doesn’t exist) an ‘events’ folder and drop in it a file called tickets.php with this content: https://gist.github.com/46a2ab0d5133da2bd70d.

Hope that helps! Please let us know if not, and thanks again for your support.

[Rob]

Hey Riccardo. At this point the tickets each will include the name of the buyer; if one person buys 10 tickets, their name will be included on all 10 of those tickets. That being said this is one of the most commonly-requested features we saw come up in the beta and now your thread mentions it as well, so we’ll be looking to add it very soon.

Hope this helps and sorry I couldn’t offer more in the short-term. Please let me know if you have any other questions or comments here.

[Rob]

I’m checking with the dev today as to whether this code would make sense to add into the core plugin across the board. The potential risk is that it’d throw things out of whack for other users (those who didn’t need to make a code change for the plugin to work out-of-the-box to begin with).

[Rob]

Thanks for confirming as much, Robert. Glad to hear that solved it in the short-term. The broader issue of the requirement to do it anytime you change the slug should be addressed in the next maintenance build….we’ve already finished and QA’d that bit of code, it is just now awaiting release. Should be very soon. Thanks for your patience so far.

Please let us know what else we can do down the road.

[Rob]

Hi again Roberto. We have spent the past few days testing this (both Leah and our lead dev spent a good chunk of yesterday working together on it). There is definitely something at play with the theme itself that we’re unable to identify on our end. While we can recreate the problem, we’re no closer to figuring out a fix than we were two days ago.

As we’ve already spent as much time as we can on this – our support resources need to be distributed evenly among the bulk of paying customers – I’m not sure how much more I can offer up on our end. We do our best to make sure the plugin integrates out-of-the-box with all themes out there that are following WordPress best practices. If you haven’t reached out to the theme dev yet I would suggest doing so.

On our part, since I don’t want to leave you stuck with a product you can’t use, I’d be happy to refund you your purchase price for Events Calendar PRO. If you wish to take that route please forward your Paypal receipt to pro /a/ tri.be and I can get that refund taken care of. Thanks again for your patience so far and my apologies that we couldn’t figure out what’s up with this theme integration in the time we had.

[Rob]

Hey Chris. Thanks for the note; happy to help you out here. While I cannot swap one license for another (our system unfortunately doesn’t allow it), what I can do is refund you the purchase price you paid for Events Calendar PRO so you use those funds to purchase Community instead.

That work? If so, please forward your Paypal receipt to pro /a/ tri.be and we will get that going for you. Cheers!

[Rob]

Hey again Matt. Since we never heard anything back here I’m going to assume you’re all set, and am closing this thread out accordingly. Please let me know if you disagree by emailing pro /a/ tri.be and we can re-open this as needed.

[Author]

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