Updates

Happy New Year to all of our AddEvent users both old and new! 

You asked and we listened...we have updated our Hobby user limits for RSVP and Calendar Subscribers by 100%. Increasing this usage allows Hobby users up to 20 RSVPs per usage cycle and 20 ongoing Calendar Subscribers.

We hope this allows our Hobby users to host more types of RSVP events and grow their calendar subscribers as needed! 

Cheers, 

Team AddEvent

‘Tis the season for giving, and today we’re giving you: updates, bug fixes, and some legal stuff! 

Updates 

• If you love our embeddable calendars, this one is for you! We’ve added (what we think is an incredibly sleek) new dark mode for our embeddable calendars. In addition to “always” dark mode, we’ve also added an automatic dark/light mode that switches based on the end-users browsers' settings. To use it, you will need to create a custom template for your embeddable calendar and apply that template.
  • Documentation on how to do create a custom template using one of our new themes can be found here. 
• Linguaphiles rejoice! We have added the option to have the recurring rule explanation (e.g. “Repeats Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6 times”) be translated into 12 different languages. To use it, you will need to create a custom event landing page template & change the language of that template. 
  • Documentation on how to do this can be found here.
  • Supported languages include: German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Persian, Finish, Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• When sending update emails to your RSVP attendees, we had been ignoring the custom “From” name and email address that we allow you to set (the automatic confirmation and reminder emails were working correctly). This was just one of those things that we missed, but has now been fixed so your users will always know who you are when you contact them via our system.
• When using custom HTML questions in an RSVP form, the attendee notification sent to account managers would pull in the value of the previous questions. Instead of sending the responses once (as intended), there was a bug that was inserting the responses multiple times in the email. For a minute there, we got to live out our Oprah fantasy via our emails by saying “YOU GET A RESPONSE, AND YOU GET THAT SAME RESPONSE, AND YOU GET THAT SAME RESPONSE”.  Sadly, our days of Oprah-style emails are behind us, but thanks everyone for your patience while we got that fixed. 

The Boring Stuff…

...unless you’re on the compliance team, then woo!

• We have updated the DPA (Data Processing Agreement) on our website. The following changes will go into effect from January 1st, 2023 :
  • the new EU SCCs of 2021
  • the UK Transfer Addendum of March 2022
  • modifications to cover transfers of personal data from Switzerland in accordance with Swiss law (FADP)

If you’re still reading this, then thanks for keeping up with the AddEventians, and we hope everyone has a happy holiday season and New Year!

AddEvent is pleased to announce our acquisition of Eventable, a leading provider of add-to-calendar services and online event solutions!

AddEvent has been involved in calendar and event management tools since our founding, and this acquisition will allow us to continue developing our tools and services while enabling us to reach a broader audience.

If you’d like to learn more about this acquisition, you can read our full article.

Cheers, 

The AddEvent Team

November’s release updates are here and ready to be shared! This month we had a handful of bugs that needed some fixing before the holiday season fully takes off. 

Take a peek at our bugfixes below:

• Starting out strong with less of a bug and more of an update - for anyone using the RSVP summary emails (both “daily” and “every time a user RSVPs”), we have good news for you! We updated these emails to include the event name and time to make it clear which event the end-user has RSVP’d to. Previously these emails only included a link to the event landing page so we hope this makes everyone’s lives a bit easier, especially when you have lots of events! 
• In other RSVP-related news, we made an update so the system will check if the RSVP limit has been hit when the end-user submits an RSVP form as opposed to when the RSVP landing page has loaded. This had been an issue previously when multiple registrants were hitting the page simultaneously and as a result, the limit was being exceeded in some specific instances.
• If you read our last release notes, you might remember that we had to start truncating event descriptions for subscription calendars to ensure that the .ics file size did not exceed the limit for certain calendar platforms. Well, we have added in (both at the account and calendar levels) settings to not truncate event descriptions for subscription calendars as requested. This is an internal setting on our end, so you’ll need to reach out to our support team to tweak this to your liking.
• Speaking of account-level settings - we have added the ability to set the maximum number of events to include in the .ics feed for subscription calendars. Again, this is an internal setting, so you’ll need to reach out to our support team to adjust this max.
• To wrap this release up we focused on everyone’s favorite concept - timezones! Previously, events without a timezone set were not showing up on calendar landing pages. This was clearly a bug, so we’ve fixed this and your events will now show up on the calendar landing pages whether or not you include a timezone!
• Thanks as always for letting us know if there are any bugs you’re finding out there in the wild and we will continue to take care of them as soon as possible!

October was a busy month for not just us, but all of you as well! As we continue to push out new releases, we also need to push out some bug fixes and that’s what this release was all about! 

Take a peek at our bugfixes below:

• Some users were experiencing errors when event descriptions were too long. This was usually seen on the sign-in page of some of our supported calendar platforms, and showed up when users were signed out or browsing in incognito mode. We hate to be the strict parent, but this time, we had to be a little more strict about truncating event descriptions when they exceed a character limit. 
• We optimized usage counts in several areas, in particular for counts of active calendar subscribers. We’re seeing speed improvements of up to 10x, so you should hopefully see your calendar subscriber counts update quicker than ever before.
• We recently made a change to how we dealt with calendar subscribers that were blocked or deleted in the AddEvent platform. This change meant that calendar subscribers were not being blocked or deleted (we literally had one job here) so we’ve updated back to the old way so that your calendar subscribers will now be blocked or deleted correctly again! 
• Speaking of calendar subscribers, the subscription calendar wasn’t working for .ics feeds that exceeded a file size limit for certain calendar platforms. We have made some changes to ensure the .ics feed is now working again in more scenarios:
  • limiting the pull to 300 events into the feed
  • truncating the event description when it exceeds a certain character limit.
• We love viewing calendars in the week view as much as anyone, so when we heard that there were issues displaying events on our embeddable calendar when a week started in one month and ended in another, we knew that had to be fixed. This bug should now be exterminated and all weeks should show the events correctly on the first attempt regardless of which month the week starts or ends in. 
• If you were looking for detailed usage stats and thought your calendar and calendar subscriber count seemed higher than it should be, you were probably correct! We had a bug that was counting and displaying deleted calendars in some of our tables. These numbers should now match the counts on the usage stats page and accurately reflect your active calendar and calendar subscriber counts. 
• If you looked closely at the RSVP confirmation and reminder emails:mag_right:  you may have noticed a rogue  extra  space in some scenarios. This has been corrected and all spacing should now be back to normal (if spacing can even be “normal”).
• We came across an issue that certain values weren’t working in custom event landing page templates for events that were RSVP enabled. We’ve fixed this and you shouldn’t see issues with using those values in custom templates moving forward. 
• Lastly, we added an “[RSVP]” indicator to events with RSVP enabled on subscription calendars and added a convenient link for the end-user to RSVP to that event.

We're constantly adding new features and making improvements and fixes to our existing ones. Here are some of the highlights from what we've been working on since the last time we shared:

Updates

• You asked and we listened! We’ve added the ability to have a direct link to add an event to a calendar service, even if the event is an RSVP event. Our standard direct links in this scenario redirect to the RSVP landing page (because usually you would like users to RSVP to the event before adding it to their calendar), but we’ve added an extra parameter to “force” users to the add-to-calendar flow instead. This is really handy if you want to include the add-to-calendar links in a confirmation or reminder email for users who have already RSVPd to the event.
• Updated the calendar subscriber feed to include the additional location details in the event description. Our additional location details feature allows you to include secure links, passwords or addresses for where the event is hosted, but only display them after a user has signed up for the event or calendar, so they don’t become public knowledge.

 Bugfixes

• Optimized our calendar subscriber counts to refresh on a more consistent basis so your calendar subscriber counts are now more likely to be accurate when you check them. Accuracy seems like something worth striving for here.
• Microsoft teams has some crazy “Join meeting” links. We’ve updated our add-to-calendar functionality to handle processing and rendering these urls correctly as they were previously getting jumbled when users added an event with a Microsoft Teams link included
• Updated the usage stats page to show ongoing usage data instead of entirely blank results if there was no monthly usage in the selected usage period. 
• We got a little excited about sharing AddEvent with the world and we're seeing issues with turning off the AddEvent branding on some paid accounts that had toggled it off. This has been fixed and should no longer be an issue - our apologies!
• In our update from last month, we mentioned sending out notices when you’re approaching the usage limits on your account. Unfortunately, due to a bug with start and end dates, some customers received multiple emails notifying them of end-user limits approaching/exceeding, etc in too short of a window. See, times and dates are hard, even for people who build calendars for a living!
• When adding an event with a long event description to their calendar, users reported seeing an error on certain calendar platforms if they were signed out of their accounts or in an incognito window. We’ve now started truncating event descriptions to help deal with this, and adding a link back to the event landing page to see the remainder of the description.
• We’ve also made multiple other smaller bug fixes, link corrections and database optimizations - far too many to mention!

We're always striving to make improvements to AddEvent that make our users' lives easier! Here are some of the highlights from our latest release to keep you on top of your usage limits and branding options:

• We’ve updated the “Powered by AddEvent” branding on event and calendar landing pages, embeddable events, calendars, and more to be a little bit prettier, more modern, and to match our current branding. 
• Added an easy toggle to the settings page to turn AddEvent branding on or off accross your account that applies to all public facing events and calendars. Please note that you will need to be on a paid plan to toggle AddEvent branding off. 
• You will now receive an in-app notifications and account emails to let you know when you are approaching or have reached your limit on event-adds, rsvp attendees, and calendar subscribers. The goal here is to let you know in advance before limiting any of your functionality. 

We're constantly adding new features and making improvements and fixes to our existing ones. Here are some of the highlights from what we've just updated:

• We’ve updated the sign in and sign up pages to prioritize the SSO options above email and password sign in. We’ve also added Microsoft as a SSO option for all users that are looking to sign in using Microsoft SSO.
• We removed LinkedIn as a SSO option and converted all LinkedIn users to the classic email and password sign in. If you previously used LinkedIn to sign in, please check your email as you should have received an email to update your password.
• When a user selects “can’t go” to a RSVP event, notification emails to event organizers will now include the end-user’s information instead of a generic “one person can’t go” message.
• Bug Fix: The countdown timer on our embeddable events lists was calculating the remaining time incorrectly when users changed their time zone. This is now fixed and the countdown timer is now counting smoothly!

As you've probably noticed by now, AddEvent has a new website! We’ve been working hard on this redesign for quite a while, and we're incredibly excited to finally share it with you.

Over the past couple of years, as we've been building new tools for you, our old website became a little bit out of date and was badly in need of a refresh. Our new website has been completely redesigned from scratch, with a new navigation structure, a renewed focus on the solutions we offer to our users, and a brand new visual identity!

We think that the new website not only looks absolutely stunning, but it will also make it easier than ever for our users to understand how our tools work together to make sharing your events and calendars as simple and straightforward as possible. We’ve broken down our solutions into 5 main areas: share events, collect RSVPs, subscription calendar, embeddable calendar, and automated events.

As part of the relaunch, we've also updated our branding, including a beautiful new logo, updated fonts, a new color palette, and some amazing visuals throughout the website.

We hope you’ll love the changes as much we do, but if you run into any issues with the new website, find anything that's not working as it should, or have some feedback please let us know at support@addevent.com.

Today, Friday December 17th from 9am to 3pm (Pacific time), we're updating AddEvent.com as well as our backend which now will live on "app.addevent.com".

During the maintainance window: 

• If you enter any event information in the Dashboard, make sure you save a local copy in case you are "kicked out" of a session.
• You might need to sign in again as the backend now is accessible in a new location (app.addevent.com).

The updates we are doing today are massive (new infrastructure) and have been tested extensively for the past 14 days.

When entering a real "live" environment things might go wrong temporarily. In case anything happens, we're on it - and will continue testing and correcting.  

In case you stumble upon anything that's wrong, please let us know.

Michael

support@addevent.com

We're excited to announce that we've been working with Mailchimp as part of the beta program for their new App Marketplace to build and launch an AddEvent Calendar Links app. This new app will let you add a content block containing add-to-calendar links for your events or subscription calendars directly to your emails without ever leaving the Mailchimp email builder.

We're thrilled to be partnering with Mailchimp as part of their Marketplace launch, and we think this app will provide tons of value for our users by making it easier than ever to share your events and calendars in your email campaigns.

This new functionality is being offered to users on all of our plans, including the free Hobby plan!

• Check out the AddEvent Calendar Links app on the Mailchimp marketplace to connect your AddEvent account to Mailchimp.
• Follow our helpful guide on how to start using the extension.
• If you run into any issues with the extension or need help getting set up, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at mailchimp@addevent.com

We're constantly adding new features and making improvements and fixes to our existing ones. Here are some of the highlights from what we've been working on over the past couple of weeks:

• The event and calendar landing pages have been updated with a beautiful new design that we think looks great. Check out some examples here: event landing page, calendar landing page. As always, our landing pages are completely customizable if you want to make it your own with a custom template.
• Event and calendar landing pages now include a timezone selector. This allows your users to set their timezone, and shows the user the event times and dates converted to that timezone before they add it to their calendar. We also predict what timezone they are in when they open the landing page, but they can change it if needed using this new selector. Previously, we were also predicting their timezone, but there was no way to change it in case we were wrong (if they were using a VPN, for example).
• We've also updated the design and added the new timezone selector to our embeddable events.
• We've tweaked the design of the embeddable calendar so it now looks even better, and in particular made improvements to the mobile view of the calendar, which had been starting to look dated.
• We've added the ability to search for timezones within the timezone selector on our embeddable calendar which means that users no longer have to scroll through the entire list to find the timezone they want to see events in.
• We've added our direct URL method to Zapier, which means that you can automatically add add-to-calendar links to your emails without writing a single line of code. Check out our separate update post below, or this quick tutorial of how to get it set up!

The Direct URL method allows you to build automated add-to-calendar links into your email campaign templates to give your users add-to-calendar links customized just for them. And now we've just made it even easier to use by including all that great functionality in the latest version of our Zapier integration. This means you can now automatically add add-to-calendar links to your emails without writing a single line of code. 

Simply connect your CRM, email campaign tool, webinar/video conferencing platform or events database with AddEvent in Zapier to unlock this powerful new functionality. Once your AddEvent account is connected in Zapier, simply choose the new "Direct URL Method" trigger from the options within the zap! Make sure you check out our 5-minute tutorial to get started.

Use cases:

• Automatically insert add-to-calendar links in confirmation and reminder emails when your users register for an event or book an appointment
• Include a unique Zoom webinar link in the calendar invite you send to each participant who signs up for your event
• Include a personalized event description for each user with information from your CRM
• Share different events with your users based on their time zone or location

Resources to check out:

• AddEvent & Zapier integration
• A quick tutorial to get you set up
• The Direct URL Method documentation

We've been busy making some fixes and improvements to our software:

• When several of our tools (add-to-calendar button, embeddable events list, embeddable calendar) were combined on a single page, the add-to-calendar button was sometimes not being positioned correctly. We've made an update to make sure the add-to-calendar button is always positioned correctly.
• In the embeddable calendar, upcoming events with a recurring rule were not showing up correctly going into the future. That has been corrected so recurring events are now displayed accurately.
• On AddEvent you can synchronize events from external calendars. Typically the dates and times of events in the external calendar feeds are in UTC time. We now automatically convert those dates and times into local time instead of leaving them in UTC.
• In the Zapier List Events trigger, all events were not being listed from across all calendars, only the Main Calendar. We have resolved the issue and released Zapier version 5.0.2 as well as migrated all users to this version so it takes effect immediately.

On a regular basis, we test the methods for adding events to calendars. We currently have two methods we would like to get back to using - those methods are: 

• Outlook.com + Office 365 (direct methods).
  
  These two methods allow us to send the user directly to their calendar app without having to grant access to our app at Microsoft.
  These methods are getting very close to working again. They have been tested but still fail to produce good content. We’ll continue using the Microsoft Events API for inserting events into the user’s calendar until the issues have been resolved by Microsoft.
  
  
• Yahoo.com (direct method)
  
  This method has been out of service since Yahoo updated its calendar service in January 2021. We’ve reworked how we add events to Yahoo and we’re now able to add events again. When we parse date/time to Yahoo all date formats are ignored by Yahoo. Therefore we now on the basis of the user’s IP time zone convert the events date/time to the user’s date/time and parse it to Yahoo Calendar. This leaves some room for errors but for the majority of users, it’ll work as intended.
  
  We obviously hope Yahoo Calendar and the team responsible for Yahoo Calendar will fix the issues the whole world is experiencing. 

Yahoo’s "Add to Calendar" functionality is broken. We went down to their HQ this morning and put up a sign to let them know. We're hoping the message will go through to the right team(s) fast and that Yahoo Calendar will work again shortly. 

With events with RSVP you can use "Custom RSVP templates". The custom RSVP templates allow you to change: 

• Confirmation email (which is sent out when users RSVP for the event).
• A reminder X hours before the event occurs
• A reminder X days before the event occurs

We've added the option to send out "Follow-up Emails". The follow-up email can, if activated, be sent out X hours after the event occurs. This functionality is brilliant if you want to automatically get reviews for your event, ask your attendees what they think about the event, etc. 

We've fixed some issues in relation to our recurring rules. The issues fixed include: 

• Fixed some specific recurring rules that did not work well with specific calendar vendors. 
• Improved the event landing pages to reflect the recurring rule so users would know how many times the event occurs. 
• Improved the event landing pages to show the upcoming event date, and last event date in case the event is past. 

We've improved the way you can delete events in the Dashboard. 

In the Dashboard you can create three types of events: 

• Singular events
• Singular events with recurrence
• Events in a series

We've improved the event deletion process to now include all of these three events. For instance, if you try to delete an event in a series you will be able to select "this" event, "following events", or "all" events. 

We've been working hard on adding "real" recurring events to our platform. We had an assumption that it would be a lot of hard work, and we were right. 
The struggle with a platform like ours is that we want our recurring events to work across all calendar vendors. After a lot of testing and tweaking, we ended up with a solution that works with all calendar vendors except for Yahoo/AOL which doesn't support recurring rules. 

Creating an event
When you create an event in the Dashboard you now have an option to make the event recurring, e.g. every Monday until a specific date. When the event is saved, the event is represented on the Dashboard calendar for X number of times (according to the rule). Events with recurrence can be shared as a singular event or shared as an event inside a calendar. 

The event landing pages, calendar landing pages, embeddable calendars have also been updated to support the recurring rules.