Events - What happened to them on the new Last.fm?

Hi there

1: In the old Last.fm, you could see which user had added each event. Where do I see that in the new Last.fm? FIXED

2: And it was also possible to see "events I've added"... didn't find that now, where is it?

3: In the old Last.fm, it was possible to "add an event for this artist" on an artist page and it would, if I remember correctly, remember which artist you were adding an event for... now you can click "add event", and you have to type in the artist name... FIXED

4: If an artist have supporting acts, only the main artist is shown in the event box on an artist page. An example: Lykke Li was supporting Guillemots in London - on Lykke Li's main page in the event box, it only says Guillemots - would be nice if it said "Guillemots + Lykke Li + whoever else is supporting", think it was like this in the old Last.fm.

That was it for now, hope the old Last.fm event functionality is still here somewhere, or will be made available soon. Thanks :)

/PixelPuma

to add to the list...

after creating an event, if i pick the option to add it to my calender, it takes me to my events page, but the event isn't added.

any way of working in the capability of changing the venue on the event edit page?

I pay my bills in part as an associate creative director (art) and often work on websites at large interactive agencies...and can honestly say that I’d have fired the interactive agency/design shop or in-house staff which oversaw the revised nightmare which last.fm has become. weak design aside, it’s IA (industry term for ‘information architecture, i.e. the skeleton structure of every website which dictates how pages and elements flow + what each contains) is atrocious. they’ve taken a clean, simple, user-friendly, effective, why-fix-what-ain’t-broken site and have rendered it overly complex, confusing, ineffective, frustrating, user-unfriendly and less pleasing to they eye.

which is to say i'm with ya too.

and will add the following event-based blemishes to your lists:




1) formerly when one added a poster for an event, it appeared on the page at postcard size....graphic, bold and great for promoting the artists + drawing in new attendees. you could also then click on the poster image to see the original image at full size in a new window.

the default size of an event poster is now about an inch-and-a-half high. and if you click this you get to see a page swipe version which is about 3.5 inches. but one which is still not large enough to serve as a decent promotional tool. (though the enlarged version contains no close button or “x”. I simply figured out that I had to click it to resume it to its normal size.)


~*~


2) last.fm now often rearranges the hierarchical orders of support bands at whim....e.g. if you've typed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 it may officially list your artists as 1, 3, 2, 5, 4....or whatever.


~*~


3) if i've attended an event but didn't think to add it before the event occurred, "see previous events" no longer appears on either a) one's personal page events section b) the venue's event section c) the artist's page event section. the only way to retroactively add an event is to search for a user's page with the hopes that they'll have attended a grayed aout recent event.


~*~


4) whereas one used to be able to easily locate "add event" buttons either on an artist or venue's page, this is now entirely impossible (nod to PixelPuma's #2). the only apparent way to add an event is to visit the site's general mass events page which contains an "add event" button on the upper right.


~*~


5) after creating a new event and selecting to attend the event, the system refuses to acknowledge one's personal attendance addition. you have to then revisit the event page in order to manually add yourself all over again. only this doesn't work either! don't know if it's a Mac deficit, but i've been unable to add myself to my own added events with firefox on multiple machines.


~*~


6) if i'm not mistaken we used to be able to click on an event name as well as the venue listed underneath it without having to go to the specific event page, to see what other events were occurring there. (which also made for quicker event adding.)


~*~


7) last.fm no longer recognizes non-letter characters within title listings. it morphs quotation marks and the like into coded, illegible muck. and if characters are a part of an artist's official name....not only does this eff up the artist's title, if further support acts have been listed....lengthy coded neighboring titles prevents their own titles from being seen. (*update: after a few minutes the characters reappear...but this was super confusing during preview mode.)


~*~


and i so totally totally also agree that featuring only the headlining act within a basic event preview is totally ludicrous. often the support acts are as good if not better (hence more desirable) than the headliner itself. it was also nice to see who had added an event. in the past I’ve contacted adders personally when info has been wrong or just to compliment them on their music tastes. though it was even more idiotic of last.fm to have removed the “see events I’ve added” option.






thanks for starting this link. I hope that last.fm takes note.

though i'm pissed enough i'm going to demand a refund for my prepaid subscription on principle, cheap though it may be. at a minimum last.fm had an obligation to inform users that vast changes were coming up before bombing everyone with the current mess.

*though it may be. at a minimum last.fm had an obligation to inform users that vast changes were coming up before bombing *

Are you kidding? It was known for a good while, and you could use the new lastfm already in beta.

Thanks for all the useful feedback, a few of these issues are known, and a few things that appear missing are just hiding :)

So...

Issues we know about that will be fixed:

* Marking your attendance after adding an event. FIXED
* Link to the user who created the event. FIXED
* Issues with special characters while editing. FIXED

Things that aren't missing but need to be more obvious:

* Events you've added: e.g. http://www.last.fm/user/Tecfan/addedevents
* Past events: e.g. http://www.last.fm/music/Ratatat/+events/2008 (These are linked as years on user/artist/venue/label events pages)

Regressions that we forgot about and will fix

* Add an event for this artist / venue. FIXED

Information design issues we need to work on:

* Better poster display
* Better hierarchy for small event lists (venue, support acts)

Longstanding problems that aren't a quick fix

* Lineup ordering. At the moment we automatically order an event's lineup by their popularity on Last.fm. We're aware this isn't ideal and often leads to incorrect lineups, but the solution (manual ordering) is a longer term fix.

no need to be snarky blackcherrypie. last.fm most definitely should have given a specific launch date by way of inbox note or email blast or on user homepages rather than officially launching all of a sudden out of the blue. (beta testing availability being no excuse, as beta testing often lasts for eons and was only available to subscription holders.) and when subscribing there most definitely should have been a notation which let users know that their subscriptions would be corresponding to a revamped site, which would have been simple, good business practice.

alternately, thanks for listening jwheare. it's good to know that staffers are reading forum responses.

: ) : ) : )

(*fyi, i also really miss being able to plug in search terms in the music section filtered by "song title" or "album title", not merely "artist" or "label". also note that the weekly top tracks/artists widgets are either backlogged or aren't working...my own says "hasn't played any tracks recently".

and here's a not-likely-to-be-considered albeit generally helpful suggestion for last.fm....***take a look at VIRB.com...it's a less popular social networking site though one which instituted a very smart formatting system. all components of a user's page have been set up into movable units which users can custom arrange like puzzle pieces to create their own page hierarchy. if you were to lock in ad positions but let users otherwise customize the placements of their about me, comments, recent visitors, friends, events sections etc..., this would be a very swell thing which i bet lots of last.fm users would really enjoy....killing numerous complaint stones in the process....as personal tastes vary from user to user.)

yes, thanks for the update jwheare.

jwheare said:
Thanks for all the useful feedback, a few of these issues are known, and a few things that appear missing are just hiding :)

thank you for that. the events page is one of the features i used the most and seems to have the least functionality in the new design.
something no one seems to have mentioned: can the events have little artist thumbnails associated with them, as before? i find it easier to look at a page and spot familiar pictures than names.
additionally, it seems more logical to have friend's events appear with your recommended events with a filter button, rather than in a separate location in my profile. if i really want to know all the events my friends have attended, i'll visit their pages.

mr_fay said:
additionally, it seems more logical to have friend's events appear with your recommended events with a filter button, rather than in a separate location in my profile. if i really want to know all the events my friends have attended, i'll visit their pages.

That's exactly how the event recommendations page does work. You only see events recommended for you at http://www.last.fm/home/eventrecs but if your friends are also going, they'll appear in that list on the right.

You can see a separate list (only visible to you) of all the events your friends are going to here:

http://www.last.fm/user/mr_fay/events?friends=1

Nice to see that "Added by: ..." is back.

Now for some new remarks:

- When I edit info for an event (http://www.last.fm/event/xxxxxx/doedit), it says "Changes successfully updated." and stays on the editing page. In my opinion it should go back to the event page automatically (or at least have a link back to the event page).

- Under my events (http://www.last.fm/user/PixelPuma/events) I have an "Your Events" tab (shouldn't it say "My Events"?) and a "Friends' Events" tab. In my opinion, all event-related stuff should be available from this page, so on my wish-list is a "Recommended Events" tab (with the content from http://www.last.fm/home/eventrecs) and an "Events I've Added" tab (with the content from http://www.last.fm/user/PixelPuma/addedevents).

Cheers,
PixelPuma

Great to hear that adding an event at the venue page will be back. That's been driving a nerd like me nuts since the change over.

kevinlit said:
AARGH! How do you change the recommended event location in this new horrible system? All I get is recommended events in Paris, but I want to change it to London. Can anyone tell me how to do this? I have been everywhere on the site and can't see how to change this now... USELESS

yeah, I moved city since the site changed and can't find a way to edit the location for recommended events... quite an oversight.

http://www.last.fm/event/499951

The dranouter line-up order is all weird (a 9-listener band is the headliner, Suzanne Vega is at the bottom of the list).

??