Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Product Update - Coming Soon: Ongoing & Repeating Event Overhaul, A New Scraping System and more!

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

We're rolling out a lot of updates early next week - and wanted to give you the good news now.

Ongoing and Repeating Events

We are updating our platform's treatment of ongoing and repeating events in the daily listings to improve the user experience and fix a few key issues. Here's how it will work:

Underneath the third event listing, there will be a new side-scrolling widget that contains the day's 12 most popular ongoing and repeating events, sorted by popularity. 


Ongoing and repeating events will be displayed in this window by default - but metros can pull any event out of this window and display it in the regular listings by checking a box on that event's page in Radmin.



Ongoing and repeating events that are displayed in the regular listings will behave exactly like regular events for all the days that they occur. This means that you can now create one event for a 3 day music festival such as Lollapalooza or Governors Ball and have that single ongoing event appear at the very top of your daily listings for each day that it occurs.

This is especially handy if you're giving away 3-day passes for a festival because you can now power the giveaway from a single event page. You don't have to put "Win 3-day passes!" on three different events.

This solution will also put an end to the occurrences of random and unimpressive weekly events appearing in the #4 slot on your metro's daily listings (our platform currently displays a random weekly event in this position). Going forward, you can rest assured that the new widgets will always display the most popular events first - so a user is much more likely to find a weekly event that they want to go to.

Please note that these changes only apply to the regular daily event listings. They do not apply to lenses, user, artist pages, ECPs or users.

New Scraping System

We have also redesigned our platform's scraping system to allow for better stability, greater visibility and improved functionality. This is going to improve accuracy, cut down on headaches, and most importantly, free up a lot of time in your work days.

Better Stability

We've rewritten the steps necessary for determining if an event ends up in the pending queue or duplicate queue to be as simple as possible. And we've added better support for accents, apostrophes and other non-alphanumeric characters - which were causing a lot of issues in the old system including placing duplicate events in the pending queue and creating broken URLs.

We also modified the duplicate queue logic to ensure that unchanged versions of the same event do not continue to appear in your duplicate queues. Now, once a potential duplicate event is deleted, the event will not return to the duplicate queue unless changes have been made to the event.

Greater Visibility

Prior to this update, we had no idea how long it took for a certain scraper to run - which made it difficult to assess whether a certain scraper was problematic. We've now added run-time information to each scraper's page in Radmin - which will serve as a great way to identify your problem children moving forward.



Improved Functionality

This is the really exciting part. We now have the ability to write over-arching rules into your scraping system that can govern your entire site, a specific script or a specific venue. Examples of this functionality include:
  • Omitting the date from all event titles
  • Omitting 'Sold Out' from all event titles
  • Omitting 'Record Release' from all band names
  • Omitting any excessive language from all ticket info
We recommend making most of these decisions on a scraper-by-scraper basis - and we'll be here to work with you to fine-tune these rules to optimize your site's content and the efficiency of your work day.

For now (once your new scraping system gets rolled out), please email support if you'd like to request a rule for your metro.

Wondering how these rules are affecting your scrapes? We've broken out your new scraper readouts into two sections: "Scrape" is a readout of the scraper's data exactly as it was pulled in and "Clean Scrape" is a readout of the data after all pre-processing (which includes the scraper rules) is complete.



Changing Over

Toronto and Mexico City are already running on the new system, Louisville and New York are switching over today, and we're hoping to have all metros switched over within the next week.

We'll be reaching out to coordinate your migration to the new scraping platform - but just as an FYI: once you give the OK, your scrapers and queues will be unavailable for 2-3 hours while we complete the migration.

Once the migration is complete, your CM will receive email notifications every time a scraper fails or returns zero results. These notifications have been broken for years - but they're finally fixed. Be warned: you're going to get a lot of them (possibly hundreds) - so it will be best to filter these from your inbox and then address (by either deleting the scraper or requesting a fix) once you have a chance.

Additional Advancements

Also Arriving Next Week:

We fixed the RSVP Slots field. And it accounts for +1's too! Please keep in mind that this field should still only be used as a last resort - you always want to push partners to keep the lists open as long as possible so you can collect as many new email addresses and registered users as possible.

We added an Open/Closed toggle for RSVPs. Promoters often ask metros to re-open an RSVP that has closed - but there was no way to do on this on our new platform. 

Now, when an RSVP closes, the 'Disable Additional RSVPs' checkbox on the RSVP modal will automatically become checked - but you may un-check the box to re-open the RSVP at any time.


Please note that the RSVP lists will only be automatically sent once. So, if you re-open an RSVP, you'll need to manually re-close the RSVP and send the lists to your partner (or have the partner download them from the front end of the site).

You will be able to name and search for Assets in Radmin. Navigate to Radmin -> Site Design -> Assets to do so.

The new 'Buy VIP' buttons will now display when hovering over the event in the main event listings. Please note that if a 'Buy VIP' button is used, the 'Buy VIP' button will display when hovering over the event in the daily listings along with the 'Buy' and 'Add' buttons. This is true EVEN if the event has an RSVP or giveaway attached to it. All 4 buttons will display, however, on the event page itself.

Here's an example of how a listing will display with both a giveaway and a 'Buy VIP' link attached.


Thanks so much for reading - and please let us know if you have any questions. We'll let you know as soon as these features are deployed. To victory!

2 comments:

Thoughts to share? DO!

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Product Update - Coming Soon: Ongoing & Repeating Event Overhaul, A New Scraping System and more!

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

We're rolling out a lot of updates early next week - and wanted to give you the good news now.

Ongoing and Repeating Events

We are updating our platform's treatment of ongoing and repeating events in the daily listings to improve the user experience and fix a few key issues. Here's how it will work:

Underneath the third event listing, there will be a new side-scrolling widget that contains the day's 12 most popular ongoing and repeating events, sorted by popularity. 


Ongoing and repeating events will be displayed in this window by default - but metros can pull any event out of this window and display it in the regular listings by checking a box on that event's page in Radmin.



Ongoing and repeating events that are displayed in the regular listings will behave exactly like regular events for all the days that they occur. This means that you can now create one event for a 3 day music festival such as Lollapalooza or Governors Ball and have that single ongoing event appear at the very top of your daily listings for each day that it occurs.

This is especially handy if you're giving away 3-day passes for a festival because you can now power the giveaway from a single event page. You don't have to put "Win 3-day passes!" on three different events.

This solution will also put an end to the occurrences of random and unimpressive weekly events appearing in the #4 slot on your metro's daily listings (our platform currently displays a random weekly event in this position). Going forward, you can rest assured that the new widgets will always display the most popular events first - so a user is much more likely to find a weekly event that they want to go to.

Please note that these changes only apply to the regular daily event listings. They do not apply to lenses, user, artist pages, ECPs or users.

New Scraping System

We have also redesigned our platform's scraping system to allow for better stability, greater visibility and improved functionality. This is going to improve accuracy, cut down on headaches, and most importantly, free up a lot of time in your work days.

Better Stability

We've rewritten the steps necessary for determining if an event ends up in the pending queue or duplicate queue to be as simple as possible. And we've added better support for accents, apostrophes and other non-alphanumeric characters - which were causing a lot of issues in the old system including placing duplicate events in the pending queue and creating broken URLs.

We also modified the duplicate queue logic to ensure that unchanged versions of the same event do not continue to appear in your duplicate queues. Now, once a potential duplicate event is deleted, the event will not return to the duplicate queue unless changes have been made to the event.

Greater Visibility

Prior to this update, we had no idea how long it took for a certain scraper to run - which made it difficult to assess whether a certain scraper was problematic. We've now added run-time information to each scraper's page in Radmin - which will serve as a great way to identify your problem children moving forward.



Improved Functionality

This is the really exciting part. We now have the ability to write over-arching rules into your scraping system that can govern your entire site, a specific script or a specific venue. Examples of this functionality include:
  • Omitting the date from all event titles
  • Omitting 'Sold Out' from all event titles
  • Omitting 'Record Release' from all band names
  • Omitting any excessive language from all ticket info
We recommend making most of these decisions on a scraper-by-scraper basis - and we'll be here to work with you to fine-tune these rules to optimize your site's content and the efficiency of your work day.

For now (once your new scraping system gets rolled out), please email support if you'd like to request a rule for your metro.

Wondering how these rules are affecting your scrapes? We've broken out your new scraper readouts into two sections: "Scrape" is a readout of the scraper's data exactly as it was pulled in and "Clean Scrape" is a readout of the data after all pre-processing (which includes the scraper rules) is complete.



Changing Over

Toronto and Mexico City are already running on the new system, Louisville and New York are switching over today, and we're hoping to have all metros switched over within the next week.

We'll be reaching out to coordinate your migration to the new scraping platform - but just as an FYI: once you give the OK, your scrapers and queues will be unavailable for 2-3 hours while we complete the migration.

Once the migration is complete, your CM will receive email notifications every time a scraper fails or returns zero results. These notifications have been broken for years - but they're finally fixed. Be warned: you're going to get a lot of them (possibly hundreds) - so it will be best to filter these from your inbox and then address (by either deleting the scraper or requesting a fix) once you have a chance.

Additional Advancements

Also Arriving Next Week:

We fixed the RSVP Slots field. And it accounts for +1's too! Please keep in mind that this field should still only be used as a last resort - you always want to push partners to keep the lists open as long as possible so you can collect as many new email addresses and registered users as possible.

We added an Open/Closed toggle for RSVPs. Promoters often ask metros to re-open an RSVP that has closed - but there was no way to do on this on our new platform. 

Now, when an RSVP closes, the 'Disable Additional RSVPs' checkbox on the RSVP modal will automatically become checked - but you may un-check the box to re-open the RSVP at any time.


Please note that the RSVP lists will only be automatically sent once. So, if you re-open an RSVP, you'll need to manually re-close the RSVP and send the lists to your partner (or have the partner download them from the front end of the site).

You will be able to name and search for Assets in Radmin. Navigate to Radmin -> Site Design -> Assets to do so.

The new 'Buy VIP' buttons will now display when hovering over the event in the main event listings. Please note that if a 'Buy VIP' button is used, the 'Buy VIP' button will display when hovering over the event in the daily listings along with the 'Buy' and 'Add' buttons. This is true EVEN if the event has an RSVP or giveaway attached to it. All 4 buttons will display, however, on the event page itself.

Here's an example of how a listing will display with both a giveaway and a 'Buy VIP' link attached.


Thanks so much for reading - and please let us know if you have any questions. We'll let you know as soon as these features are deployed. To victory!

2 comments:

Thoughts to share? DO!