Event feeds & Time.ly network sign-in

Hi! Wise as ever! Thanks for this post. A very important question!

I wasn’t even aware that they want to charge fees for feeds now. That is so not cool. You don’t take away features by moving them to a pay service.

Welp, time to go looking for another solution.

Really? Is that the plan? How do you know?

Ah – now I see. Timely have really surpassed themselves this time. This is no way to treat existing customers and I am inclined to report it. For the record, I already pay an annual fee for Pro,but forcing a change of terms onto existing, paying customers in this very deceptive manner (“upgrade” with no warning of what it contained) must, I am sure, break every business ethic (and legislation?) in existence. This change ( 1 feed only, for the additional websites) has, overnight, destroyed a whole network of business workflow which has taken months of work to build.

PS. I feel sure Timely will not reply – in the same way as they have not replied to my repeated requests for support on ONE small issue – and I am a paying customer. I will, however, be taking this further. What makes this SO sad is that I did try the Hub calendar but it is riddled with bugs so I cancelled my plan. Why or why not get a good product working before you try (force) everyone to move onto it?

In the meantime please refund the subscription renewal fee which went through very recently. It was paid in good faith for a product that I had agreed to buy – but you have now changed the nature of that product mid agreement.

Still no response form anyone at Time.ly about this. Even after I sent some emails to people who previously responded on the issue, things are suddenly silent.

I’m happy to PAY for the ability to directly fetch feeds (like the plugin used to), rather than going through the Time.ly network.

Issues with using the Time.ly network to me are:

1. What happens if Time.ly’s network is unresponsive? We had that whole issue with the refer link thing that went bad (blocked by Google no less), so what’s to stop something similar happening to the feed service?

2. If the connection between the website and the Time.ly network stops and there is no flow of traffic (eg: a network routing issue), there’s no event updates. There’s also no way I can debug the issue. This just adds another pathway that can fail causing my events not to update.

3. If the feed sites block the Time.ly network from doing updates (due to rate limiting or whatever) there is no way to debug this.

4. The fact that all the feeds are pulled through the Time.ly network means that the any possibly private data that is in the feeds goes through the Time.ly network. Some feeds I’ve set up in the past are firewall and access locked so that only the target sites can fetch them. Using the Time.ly network breaks that behaviour, and means I have to share such data with Time.ly. Some feeds are on internal networks (along with the WP/Time.ly install) and do not access anything in the outside world, meaning that I’d have to expressly poke holes in a secure environment to actually use the service, let alone that this private data would then be possibly in a 3rd parties hands.

All of these are unacceptable things for the installs I’ve either managed in the past, or are currently managing.

Well said and agree on all fronts

Hey cefiar and tashmina

We have replaced the local processing of ICS imports with API based one so we can support some major enhancements to our product:
1. discover events from admin dashboard – users can now discover events and feeds that they can import into their calendar directly from their admin dash.
2. API – expand our product beyond wordpress into API, so we can offer to our users multiple ways to manage their events, like mobile apps, other web CMSs and a unified API based SaaS.
3. Opening the road for existing hub features and other new ones, to be used by plugin users.

I know some changes we’re making are uncomfortable and concerning for some of our customers, but we have been and continue to be driven by addressing your needs and making sure we stay in business to do that. And of course, we are looking into accommodating private calendars, and I’m looking into all the risks you raised, cefiar, in your points.

We’d like to maintain a plugin version with the previous local ICS imports but need to consider our limited resources. But meanwhile the 2.4.x versions of the plugin can be used for any local import.

cefiar, I’m also very eager to work together to find out options that we can support for the users that have the same needs as you.

Also I want to emphasize that we DO NOT charge for feeds, but are considering building new plans or make changes for NEW users in the future. If you have been asked for upgrade to use the existing product please ping me.

tashmina, please ping me at [email protected] with the issues you saw in the hub that made you cancel it. We’ve spent so much time in the last year stabilizing and improving all our plans, and we’re obsessed now about bugs that really limit our users.

> Also I want to emphasize that we DO NOT charge for feeds

Why, then, does the plugin tell me:

You don’t have a subscription for this feature.
Please upgrade here to a plan that supports “Import Feeds”.

Hi grayco!

Please send your calendar URL to [email protected] so we can check it.

Thanks!

Calvin, why not publicly answer the question, what’s the meaning of
“
Please upgrade here to a plan that supports “Import Feeds”.
“
If you don’t charge for feeds? Doesn’t make sense, right?

grayco and alberstein, with the refactoring of the ics import we now have the possibility to build plans that do not include ics feeds, but that is not currently the case. All our existing plans include it. The message is for the plans that in the future may not include it, and it’s a bug if it appears to anyone at this point. Thanks for the heads up, we’ll fix this.

Hi grayco and alberstein.

The subscription problem is an issue on our side and I’ve already fixed it. You should be able to see the feature activated now, otherwise, please allow up to 5 minutes so the subscriptions can be synced to your calendar.

Thanks!

Still not fixed. I’m receiving the message that I too need to upgrade to access my feed. HELP