Akron Weekly trivia, monthly markets, a class that runs eight Tuesdays in a row. Recurring events are most of what happens in a city and they are also where calendars fall apart. Same for the day something moves or gets rained out. None of this is hard, it just has a right way and a wrong way.
Sending a recurring series
If you have a feed, use the recurrence rule your calendar software already supports. An ICS feed can say every Tuesday at 7pm until December in one entry, and we expand that into individual nights on our side. That is the cleanest version by a mile, and it means changing the series later is one edit for you.
If you are submitting by hand, do not send us fifty separate submissions. Send one and tell us the pattern in plain words. Every Tuesday, 7pm, through the end of the year, skipping Christmas Eve. We will set it up. The skipping part matters, because a series that quietly does not happen on a holiday is worse than no listing.
One thing to decide up front: is this one event that repeats, or a series of different events. Trivia night every Tuesday is the first. A concert series where each night is a different band is the second, and those should be listed individually with the artist in each title, or nobody can tell them apart.
Changing something that is already up
Edit, do not resubmit. Resubmitting is the number one way duplicates get created, and once there are two versions of your event on the calendar the wrong one will get the clicks about half the time.
- If it came from your feed: change it on your site, keeping the same event ID and URL, and we will pick the change up on the next nightly pull. Do not delete the entry and make a new one for the new date. That reads as a cancellation plus a brand new event.
- If you submitted it by hand: email intake@akronpulse.com with the link to the listing and what changed. One line is enough.
Cancellations
Tell us. Please. A cancelled event that still shows as happening is the thing that does the most damage, both to you and to us, because somebody drove there.
Email us. Right now that is the path that works, including for organizations we pull from a feed. Subject line CANCELLED plus the event name is plenty, sent to intake@akronpulse.com. If it is same day, say so in the subject and we will move it to the front.
Being straight with you about why: our feed reader does not yet act on a cancelled status inside an ICS file, so marking it there and assuming we caught it is a real risk. Keep marking it in your own calendar, because that is right for everyone else reading your feed, and send us the email anyway. When we do support reading it we will say so here.
Also, do not just delete the entry. Deleting is ambiguous. A feed that stops mentioning an event could mean it was cancelled or could mean your site had a bad night, and we deliberately do not treat a missing entry as a cancellation for that reason.
Weather calls are the common case. If you cancel at 4pm for a 6pm outdoor event, email us at 4pm. It is a two minute job on our end and it is the difference between a mild disappointment and somebody standing in a parking lot in the rain.
Postponed is not cancelled
Say which one it is. Postponed means the same event on a new date, and we can move the existing listing so it keeps whatever attention it has already collected. Cancelled means it is not happening. If you tell us cancelled and then rebook it, that becomes a new listing starting from zero, so use the right word.
Sold out
Worth telling us as well, though it is lower stakes. We would rather show people that a thing is full than have them click through to a ticket page that has been closed for a week.
The short version
- Recurrence belongs in your feed as a rule, not as fifty entries.
- Edit in place, keep the same ID, never resubmit.
- Email us the cancellation. Do not just delete the row.
- Postponed and cancelled are different words with different outcomes.
- Same day changes get same day attention if you say it is same day.
If you post often enough that this is a weekly chore, the partner portal may be a better fit than emailing us.