Not enough location-based time zones + manual offset causing bugs

Resolved nikkoboy
(@nikkoboy)

1 year, 7 months ago

This plugin misses cruelly location-based time zones (since apparently, you do not recommend that we use the manual offsets like “UTC+1” that you propose, because… that causes bugs! more on this subject following this introduction)

I don’t understand for example why there is not at least one city for each of the 50 states in the US, but there are 3 cities in North Dakota (Beulah, Center, New Salem). Why is that?

It makes no sense at all. Especially since it is very easy to provide this kind of functionality. All you have to do is add the corresponding cities with their time zones.
Because the problem is not for your users to have to manually enter the corresponding UTC zone (UTC-7, UTC+2, etc.), even if it is a pain to do. The real problem is that I just found out after 5 years of using The Event Calendar Pro, that you don’t recommend using manual offsets like “UTC+1” because it causes potential bugs (https://theeventscalendar.com/extensions/allow-only-location-time-zones-for-events/). It makes no sense that you offer your users the possibility to use manual offsets, if they cause bugs! If it causes bugs, you should just not offer it. That’s just absurd.

So now I just installed version 6.0 of The Event Calendar and The Event Calendar Pro, and after running the migration preview, I get the following message: “We detected one or more events that cannot be properly migrated. Please review the report below for more information. These issues must be resolved before you can migrate your site. Once you have updated or removed problematic events, please re-run the migration preview: The event generated an error: [The start_date and start_date_utc has a conflict when using the timezone of the event.. The end_date_utc does not match the value of end_date with the timezone]. Update the event and try again, or check out our Troubleshooting tips.

What is the solution? I have almost 600 events in my database, most of which use a manual offsets like “UTC+1”. And I can’t re-edit them one by one to be “compatible” with the migration standards, because you offer the option to use manual offsets while they cause bugs.

I hope you are working on a solution that would solve this kind of problem because currently your plugin is not really up to what we can expect from a company like yours. And please, add more location-based time zones to your plugin (at least one city for each of the 50 states in the US…)

Thanks

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

bpcake
(@bpcake)

1 year, 7 months ago
I’m not in anyway connected with the plugin, but…

It makes sense that The Events Calendar (TEC) plugin would list 3 timezones for North Dakota. That’s from the IANA timezone database often used in computer programming (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_North_Dakota). You can find more information about the database at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database. If TEC created their own special list of timezones, they would need to manually modify the list several times a year as timezones changed world-wide, increasing the chance for mistakes. They may also be using some third-party software to handle timezones that assumes the use of that database.

This isn’t ideal, but if you have a software developer available, they could possibly write some software to automate converting the events. One approach might be to export the wp_postmeta table from the database, write some software to make automated updates to the exported table, then import the result. An example set of rows for the start and end dates/times for event number 14794 might end up looking something like this in wp_postmeta:
```
(218722, 14794, '_EventStartDate', '2022-08-06 07:30:00'),
(218723, 14794, '_EventEndDate', '2022-08-06 08:00:00'),
(218724, 14794, '_EventStartDateUTC', '2022-08-06 11:30:00'),
(218725, 14794, '_EventEndDateUTC', '2022-08-06 12:00:00'),
(218726, 14794, '_EventDuration', '1800'),
(218728, 14794, '_EventTimezone', 'America/Indiana/Indianapolis'),
(218729, 14794, '_EventTimezoneAbbr', 'EDT'),
```
This shows that event #14794 starts at 7:30am on August 6, 2022. It lasts until 8:00am on August 6, 2022 (1800 seconds). The timezone is ‘America/Indiana/Indianapolis’. Since this is during daylight saving time in Indianpolis, the timezone abbreviation is EDT rather than EST.

During daylight saving time, EDT is 4 hours behind UTC, so we add 4 hours to the event start and date times to get the equivalent UTC time. If the date was not during daylight saving time, the listed timezone would be ‘EST’, and we would add 5 hours to the start and end dates/times to get the necessary UTC times.

I realize this is confusing, but hopefully it helps a little.
Plugin Support Guga Alves
(@gugaalves)

1 year, 7 months ago

Hi @nikkoboy,

Thank you for contacting us. I’ll be happy to help you.

I don’t understand for example why there is not at least one city for each of the 50 states in the US, but there are 3 cities in North Dakota (Beulah, Center, New Salem). Why is that?

The timezone list we show comes from WP, which is the standard list that PHP uses from the IANA timezone database, as mentioned in the answer provided above. So, that’s not something decided by our company; we only follow the best standards using the timezones available via WordPress to avoid recreating something already provided by PHP and used by WordPress.

As mentioned in our documentation, you can pick a city in your timezone, which will be enough as the city name will not be used anywhere on your site but only the timezone.

I get the following message: “We detected one or more events that cannot be properly migrated. Please review the report below for more information. These issues must be resolved before you can migrate your site. Once you have updated or removed problematic events, please re-run the migration preview: The event generated an error: [The start_date and start_date_utc has a conflict when using the timezone of the event. The end_date_utc does not match the value of end_date with the timezone]. Update the event and try again, or check out our Troubleshooting tips.

I’ll need to check the best approach for that specific error message with our developers, but I’ll be back once I have more details about it. The best test you can do now that’s working for many users is selecting a timezone (a near city, for example), re-save your permalinks (to force URL rewrite to be reinterpreted), and test the migration again. If a specific Event is still showing issues, edit that event and check if the dates are not empty.
Plugin Support Guga Alves
(@gugaalves)

1 year, 7 months ago
Hi @nikkoboy, @bpcake,

I’ve talked to our developers, and I’m back with good news.

About the error message: that is not about the timezone, but about the duration, the dates, AND the timezones not matching; We’ll fix that on the next update.

You can wait for the next release and then try and migrate your events, and in the meantime, you can continue to use your calendar without migrating.

We also recommend changing that UTC offset-based time zone to a location-based one that matches your time zone, so it’ll avoid any issues like that in the future.
- This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by Guga Alves.
- This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by Guga Alves.
Plugin Support Guga Alves
(@gugaalves)

1 year, 7 months ago

As an additional note, I’ve run some tests on the localhost environment and also had that same issue. The migration worked properly after deleting auto-draft events and emptying the trash.

Plugin Support Gladys
(@greventscalendar)

1 year, 7 months ago

We wanted to let you know with our latest release of The Events Calendar 6.0.1, we resolved an issue that was causing an error regarding start/end timezones. Be sure to review our full Release Notes for more details and update your plugin at your earliest convenience.

As always, we suggest testing updates on a staging site first, and having a recent backup, but it should all be smooth sailing. If you implemented any workarounds, you may remove them after updating.

If you still have issues after updating to the latest releases, please open a new forum thread and include any specific details.

Plugin Support Abz
(@abzlevelup)

1 year, 5 months ago

Hey @nikkoboy, this thread has been inactive for a while, so we’re going to go ahead and mark it Resolved. Please feel free to open a new thread if any other questions come up, and we’d be happy to help.

Cheers,
Abz