May | Updates, Bug Fixes, And New Features

Hi there, 

We know it’s been a while but we’re reaching out with some exciting updates about all the work we’ve been doing at Plug.Events! We promise it’s worth the read.

The New Plug.Events Experience

We are thrilled to share our new website with you! Behind the scenes, we’ve been creating an innovative way for communities to find, share, and curate events.

By serving communities first and providing simple features that are lost in the complexity and noise of traditional social media, we’re helping people reduce their social media usage without feeling socially isolated. The truth is, 2-hour in-person meetings do more for your mental health than days of scrolling through attention-fracking feeds.

If you want to know what a social network looks like when it is designed to bring people together as groups and individuals then stay tuned because we’re just getting started.

Communities We’re Working With

Our website is currently in development and being tested with a growing community.

You Too Can Be Part of the Revolution

Curious about who we are? We are a team of musicians, dancers, designers, community members, and more, but it doesn’t stop there. We would love for you to be part of us, whether you are a community ambassador, front-end engineer, back-end engineer, graphic designer, or digital marketer. We are only a few steps into our journey of a thousand miles, and there is still much to be done and ways to get involved. Our doors are open, so feel free to reach out to us!

What Comes Next?

In the upcoming months, we intend to notify you about updates to our website and the progress we have made. Behind the scenes, we have been working to bring you a host of updates, bug fixes and new features. Improvements include:

• enhanced search results
• we have added ‘search nearby’
• you can now add online events
• improved mobile navigation

Keep reading to learn how we are improving our platform to make your user experience smoother and streamlined.

Updates and Upcoming Improvements

Making Search Results Better

Our priority this month has been to improve the way events display in search results. We made the event image more prominent to create more impact, as this is often where organisers convey key information, and organisers invest a lot of time and thought designing their images and posters.

We have also improved the information included for each itemed listed so that you can see more without having to load the detail page. For example, in the list of people, we now show their availability, so that you can find hosts and others that are willing to meet up.

Search Nearby

Sometimes, when you search in villages or small towns there won’t be any results in the place you chose. To make it easier for you to find events in surrounding areas we have added the ability to search nearby, based on distance from the place you specified.

Online Events

You can now add online events, this can include a link to online streaming.

(In future, we intend to make this more clearly marked and allow people to filter for online or in-person events.)

Improving Navigation, Especially on Mobile

We have redesigned the navigation to make it consistent on all devices. This means moving all of the menus to the left column, with notifications and ‘Add content’ buttons up into the header, so everything is consistent across mobile, tablets, and desktop.

Improve Interests

Central to the way events and other content are curated on Plug is through the way interests are organized, in categorisation. Amongst other things, these categories make it possible for us to translate the website while also making user-generated interests freer flowing and organic. Previously, our design decisions made adding interests a little confusing. This has been dramatically improved in the latest release.

Important Updates Across Other Areas of the Platform

• Changes to the pin on the map to something more universal
• Improvement in the data displayed in-person search results
• Implementation of caching for Geo event search results
• Addition of resend code to email confirmation dialogue
• Improvement in the data displayed in organisation search results
• Changes to the link on recover password
• Changes to the GeoEventSearch URL to “events-near/interest/locale”
• Modifications to the bottom of search results
• Improvement in the data displayed in Event search results
• All instances of ‘Cancelled Event’ show ‘Strikethrough’
• Clearer local date & time
• Adjustments to location fields visible if online-only Event
• Search to show a persona description if a search is for ‘Anything’
• Improved Location fields

We Got These Bugs Fixed!

Intermittent Country Code Error on Sign Up

We had a strange problem recently which caused sign up not to work and reported an error with the country. This was intermittent and hard to track down. Thanks to some hard detective work this should be fixed now, but we will continue to keep an eye on it.

Bug Fixes Across Other Areas of the Platform:

• Fixed: Search results ‘jump’ to August and could not clear
• Fixed: Share dialogue errors
• Fixed: organisation logos to display in Conversations
• Fixed: search results page, after sign in, positioned on the organisation tab
• Fixed: changing the location of an event didn’t clear address Line 2
• Fixed: changes address dialogue remained open after change
• Fixed: event location sometimes showed country only
• Fixed: intermittent authentication error caused by sign-in credentials getting ‘lost’

What You Can Look Forward to From Plug.Events

Recurring Events

This would certainly be a game-changer for us.

We are adding festivals and parties from the forró and balfolk communities, but there are a lot of smaller regular events we also want to cover. Recurring events will allow us, and you, to add the classes and weekly parties that are such an important part of most dance organiser’s activities. When we release recurring events, later this year, we will publish a guide explaining everything you need to know about how to get the best out of them. If you are an organiser who has tried to post your regular events online this is going to make your life a whole lot easier.

More Coming on Next Month…

• User Support Channel. We want to make it easier for you to reach out to us, so in the near future, we will have a support feature.
• Social media previews on Plug links. When you post a link from Plug.Events you will see the images and text previews.
• Improved notifications and event suggestions. We want to give you a reliable and relevant event digest based upon your interests

We have more exciting updates and features in the pipeline. So, be sure to keep an eye out for more news from us here at Plug.Events.

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at hello@about.plug.events.