We had been successfully using the "Allow booking below minimum capacity" appointments setting until recently. I'm not sure if something has changed in recent updates, but our booking calendar will no longer show available dates when a customer selects less than the the minimum service capacity (please see attached screenshots - the minimum capacity is 4 persons, but in the screenshot only 2 people are attempting to book).
I have tried toggling the Appointments Settings off, saving the change, and then on again, and again saving it. I'm not sure what else I can do, as this feature no longer appears to work for us and we are using version 3.1.2 of Amelia. Also, the version of Wordpress was automatically updated to 5.7 earlier this month.
We would really appreciate any advice, as the main booking season begins in a few weeks.
thank you for reaching out to us, I'm sorry to hear that this happened.
Since you advised that you haven't made any changes in the meantime, please provide me a temporary WP-admin login for your site where this happens, so we could log in and take a look ‘from the inside’ as that’s the most efficient way to see and resolve the issue. We do not interfere with any data or anything else except for the plugin (in case that’s a production version of the site), and of course we do not provide login data to third party. You can write credentials here just check Private Reply so nobody can see them except us.
Unfortunately, I have been trying to log in, change password - did not succeed. It kept saying the password is incorrect but that username exists.
You can create a password account based on my email if you feel more comfortable with that - I will wait for your reply today so that I can go into the Admin immediately and get this done quickly (it is uncomfortable keeping it open for too long, I agree).
From the outside view I suspect that this may also caused the conflict, as advised in our documentation about Capacities:
Allow booking below minimum capacity
This option allows you to choose whether you will allow bookings below minimum capacity. By default, booking below minimum capacity is enabled which means that your customers will be able to schedule the appointment below minimum capacity, but that appointment will get Pending status because of it. If you disable it and set, for example 3 as minimum capacity, your customer will automatically see 2 persons selected in “Bringing anyone with you” option during the booking, and he will not be able to schedule the appointment without these two 2 persons.
Just to follow-up: the "Allow booking below minimum capacity" option was and is still enabled. So when the minimum capacity is 4, the customer is able to select less than 3 other persons in the "Bringing anyone with you" option. The problem is that if they select less than 3 other persons all dates visible in the calendar are automatically marked as unavailable for booking. If 3 persons or more are selected, those dates become available for booking.
I tested disabling the "Allow booking below minimum capacity" option, and the customer then cannot select less than 3 persons in the "Bringing anyone with you" option; the drop-down does not contain any options for less than 3 other persons options when disabled.
Were you able to get access via the login invitation okay?
Also, have you been able to get any further feedback on this? It's a particular problem for us at the moment, as it's making it difficult to put together bookings that we need to combine into a single time slot.
thank you for contacting back; I apologize it has taken this long - I have not received any login email so far.
I would just like to clarify another thing - has anyone (of customers) attempted at any point on this to make a booking above minimum capacity? This is the only time (unlikely situation to happen however it is possible) that once a booking by one person is made that the time slot becomes fully unavailable (for example minimum is 4, someone books for 3, slot is opened; if they book for 5 slot is closed for everyone else).
I have re-sent an invitation email to the "SLAC" site to your email address [email protected]
I also sent a test email to another address just to make sure it came through, so hopefully you have received it okay. Please let me know if you haven't received it.
The issue we are having is with those customers who have booked under the minimum capacity (e.g. booking for 3, where the minimum is 4), so we would expect the slot to remain open until another customer books (e.g. booking another 3) to exceed the minimum and close the slot. The slot does not appear to remain open when the booking is still under the minimum capacity - this is happening for any booking like this, and it is not an isolated case of affecting only one or two bookings.
We are currently trying to manage this by adding more duplicate employees to allow multiple bookings within the same timeslot, but this is very difficult to manage for the instructors booked.
Firstly, please accept our sincere apology for the late response.
Since this ticket has been going on for a long time, and what you're describing should not be possible, can you please provide login credentials for me, so I can log in and take a look at this? Remember that this is a public ticket, so make sure to enable the private response.
If you wish, you can use my email address from the signature, and as soon as I see the invite, I will log in and see what's happening. It would be helpful if you could also update the plugin to v3.2 before doing that, clearing cache, and testing again; and if you can provide me with FTP and database access credentials (phpMyAdmin or cPanel), so we can debug this as soon as possible.
Once again, sorry for the late response, and once again - it's a public ticket, so make sure to enable the Private response.
Just to follow-up on my previous message, I requested access to the Wordpress caching control, and cleared this also.
I have attached a quick screen recording of the issue with "Allow booking below minimum capacity" being ignored by the booking form, as this is a significant issue for us.
--
A second problem we have noticed is that when a single booking is made for a timeslot that booking slot is immediately closed, even if below the maximum capacity. We had set Amelia to continue accepting bookings after the minumum had been met in "amelia_settings" within the "wp_options" table:
appointments: { "openedBookingAfterMin": true }
This now appears to be ignored, which is costing us bookings during busy periods. We have attempted to work around it with additional "proxy employee" entries, but it makes management much more complex and makes the capacity limits useless to us :( (For reference, there was a separate issue reported in https://tmsplugins.ticksy.com/ticket/2730017/ that appears to have hidden this problem - automatically "Approved" bookings were allowing bookings to be made over the maximum capacity)
Sorry for having such an awkward problem to solve, but any assistance with this would be really appreciated.
thank you for the kind reply. I apologize for the later response, as we don't work on weekends.
I just wanted to let you know that we are working on this currently; I don't want to leave you wondering what is happening - it's a work in progress and I will make sure to inform you with a solution.
You're overwriting Service's default settings (min and max capacity) through the employee's Assigned Services section:
To be correct, you're not overwriting, but mandating the minimum capacity with this. When I set the minimum capacity to be 1 in Employee/Assigned services, I'm able to book Canoeing (1Hr) with one additional person freely:
But when you create a minimum capacity per employee, that's making the minimum capacity of 4 people be mandatory, and it's overwriting the "Allow booking below minimum capacity".
So, if you reduce the minimum capacity of your employee for this (and all other conflicting services) to 1, it will work fine, and the service will use its capacity settings without overriding it with employee settings.
I reverted the minimum capacity for "Instructor 1", so it's on 4 again.
Thank you for this! Though based on what you're saying, I think this would really benefit from the documentation being a bit clearer - it's not obvious that the Employee/Assigned Services capacity values will force the "Allow booking below minimum capacity" setting to stop working as expected. Even when looking at the database table for 'wp_amelia_providers_to_services', when a new Employee is created, they immediately inherit the minCapacity and maxCapacity.
I have updated the Canoeing settings from the Services and allowed it to update the Employee records. Is that the correct way to restore it to normal? This at least appears to allow another booking to be added to an existing booking for an employee/timeslot if the total is under the maximum capacity, which is really helpful!
Unfortunately, setting the minimum capacity in each Employee to 1 creates a different problem where no minimum is used and the "Bringing anyone with you?" option is switched off by default.
If I set the minimum capacity to 4 within Services (and have that update the Employee/Assigned Services) this appears to now allow additional bookings on an existing booking timeslot up to the maximum, but does not allow a new booking to be made by someone under the minimum capacity.
(Edit: removed query about booking below minimum for brand-new bookings, as I realised this was not possible previously either.)
We have one employee who can handle 60 attendees in every appointment.
We have two services (ticktets). The A ticket can be bought from 1 to 7 person. The B ticket can be bought from 8 to 60 person.
If I set the A service min capacity to 1 and max capacity to 7 and set the B service min capacity to 8 and max to 60, the customers can buy both tickets from 1 attendees to 60 attendees because the employee capacity overwrites the service capacity I think.
We would like that, if a customer could choose the A ticket from 1 to 7 attendees and the B ticket from 8 to 60 attendees but the employee capacity would be 60 attendees in every appointment.
thank you for the kind reply - and for the suggestion for documentation wording; I do apologize about the ambiguity of the text.
I have updated the Canoeing settings from the Services and allowed it to update the Employee records. Is that the correct way to restore it to normal?
It's immediately updating all following employees who are assigned to this service to match the updated values you made in the services accordingly.
If I set the minimum capacity to 4 within Services (and have that update the Employee/Assigned Services) this appears to now allow additional bookings on an existing booking timeslot up to the maximum, but does not allow a new booking to be made by someone under the minimum capacity.
This does cause a conflict; optionally you could change it for one employee, because chances are that for that employee's booking Amelia may allow this to be possible, however, in this particular case employee may override the service setting and allow a new booking for someone under a minimum, but I am concerned that this may cause you an overall conflict on another employee who works exact same service and has their capacity adjusted per the service setting you've updated.
Hi Bence; for your particular situation unfortunately, this is not possible - as I have advised Glenn, having different capacities may cause conflict, and disrupt the booking on the frontend for the customer.
One person can take 7 people however, they will still see 60 available; you can optionally add a note on the booking that you allow only 7 people per group. In this case everyone can see 60 available, however, they will be informed that they can book only 7 seats per person (per single booking group).
Hi,
We had been successfully using the "Allow booking below minimum capacity" appointments setting until recently. I'm not sure if something has changed in recent updates, but our booking calendar will no longer show available dates when a customer selects less than the the minimum service capacity (please see attached screenshots - the minimum capacity is 4 persons, but in the screenshot only 2 people are attempting to book).
I have tried toggling the Appointments Settings off, saving the change, and then on again, and again saving it. I'm not sure what else I can do, as this feature no longer appears to work for us and we are using version 3.1.2 of Amelia. Also, the version of Wordpress was automatically updated to 5.7 earlier this month.
We would really appreciate any advice, as the main booking season begins in a few weeks.
Thank you,
Glenn
Hi Glenn,
thank you for reaching out to us, I'm sorry to hear that this happened.
Since you advised that you haven't made any changes in the meantime, please provide me a temporary WP-admin login for your site where this happens, so we could log in and take a look ‘from the inside’ as that’s the most efficient way to see and resolve the issue. We do not interfere with any data or anything else except for the plugin (in case that’s a production version of the site), and of course we do not provide login data to third party. You can write credentials here just check Private Reply so nobody can see them except us.
Hi Glenn,
thank you for the credentials provided!
Unfortunately, I have been trying to log in, change password - did not succeed. It kept saying the password is incorrect but that username exists.
You can create a password account based on my email if you feel more comfortable with that - I will wait for your reply today so that I can go into the Admin immediately and get this done quickly (it is uncomfortable keeping it open for too long, I agree).
[email protected]
From the outside view I suspect that this may also caused the conflict, as advised in our documentation about Capacities:
Allow booking below minimum capacityThis option allows you to choose whether you will allow bookings below minimum capacity. By default, booking below minimum capacity is enabled which means that your customers will be able to schedule the appointment below minimum capacity, but that appointment will get Pending status because of it. If you disable it and set, for example 3 as minimum capacity, your customer will automatically see 2 persons selected in “Bringing anyone with you” option during the booking, and he will not be able to schedule the appointment without these two 2 persons.
Ah, I had hoped I could simply create the temporary access without needing to send an invite. I have sent you a login invite based on your email.
Thanks, Glenn
Hi Ivana,
Just to follow-up: the "Allow booking below minimum capacity" option was and is still enabled. So when the minimum capacity is 4, the customer is able to select less than 3 other persons in the "Bringing anyone with you" option. The problem is that if they select less than 3 other persons all dates visible in the calendar are automatically marked as unavailable for booking. If 3 persons or more are selected, those dates become available for booking.
I tested disabling the "Allow booking below minimum capacity" option, and the customer then cannot select less than 3 persons in the "Bringing anyone with you" option; the drop-down does not contain any options for less than 3 other persons options when disabled.
Thanks, Glenn
Hi Glenn,
thank you for the kind reply; I apologize for the later response I am waiting for the feedback from the indepth check for this issue still.
I will contact you back as soon as I have it.
Hi Ivana,
Were you able to get access via the login invitation okay?
Also, have you been able to get any further feedback on this? It's a particular problem for us at the moment, as it's making it difficult to put together bookings that we need to combine into a single time slot.
Thank you,
Glenn
Hi Glenn,
thank you for contacting back; I apologize it has taken this long - I have not received any login email so far.
I would just like to clarify another thing - has anyone (of customers) attempted at any point on this to make a booking above minimum capacity? This is the only time (unlikely situation to happen however it is possible) that once a booking by one person is made that the time slot becomes fully unavailable (for example minimum is 4, someone books for 3, slot is opened; if they book for 5 slot is closed for everyone else).
Hi Ivana,
I have re-sent an invitation email to the "SLAC" site to your email address [email protected]
I also sent a test email to another address just to make sure it came through, so hopefully you have received it okay. Please let me know if you haven't received it.
The issue we are having is with those customers who have booked under the minimum capacity (e.g. booking for 3, where the minimum is 4), so we would expect the slot to remain open until another customer books (e.g. booking another 3) to exceed the minimum and close the slot. The slot does not appear to remain open when the booking is still under the minimum capacity - this is happening for any booking like this, and it is not an isolated case of affecting only one or two bookings.
We are currently trying to manage this by adding more duplicate employees to allow multiple bookings within the same timeslot, but this is very difficult to manage for the instructors booked.
Thank you,
Glenn
Hello Glenn
Firstly, please accept our sincere apology for the late response.
Since this ticket has been going on for a long time, and what you're describing should not be possible, can you please provide login credentials for me, so I can log in and take a look at this? Remember that this is a public ticket, so make sure to enable the private response.
If you wish, you can use my email address from the signature, and as soon as I see the invite, I will log in and see what's happening. It would be helpful if you could also update the plugin to v3.2 before doing that, clearing cache, and testing again; and if you can provide me with FTP and database access credentials (phpMyAdmin or cPanel), so we can debug this as soon as possible.
Once again, sorry for the late response, and once again - it's a public ticket, so make sure to enable the Private response.
Kind Regards,
Aleksandar Vuković
[email protected]
Rate my support
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Hi Aleksandar,
Just to follow-up on my previous message, I requested access to the Wordpress caching control, and cleared this also.
I have attached a quick screen recording of the issue with "Allow booking below minimum capacity" being ignored by the booking form, as this is a significant issue for us.
--
A second problem we have noticed is that when a single booking is made for a timeslot that booking slot is immediately closed, even if below the maximum capacity. We had set Amelia to continue accepting bookings after the minumum had been met in "amelia_settings" within the "wp_options" table:
appointments: {"openedBookingAfterMin": true
}
This now appears to be ignored, which is costing us bookings during busy periods. We have attempted to work around it with additional "proxy employee" entries, but it makes management much more complex and makes the capacity limits useless to us :(
(For reference, there was a separate issue reported in https://tmsplugins.ticksy.com/ticket/2730017/ that appears to have hidden this problem - automatically "Approved" bookings were allowing bookings to be made over the maximum capacity)
Sorry for having such an awkward problem to solve, but any assistance with this would be really appreciated.
Thank you,
Glenn
Hi Glenn,
thank you for the kind reply. I apologize for the later response, as we don't work on weekends.
I just wanted to let you know that we are working on this currently; I don't want to leave you wondering what is happening - it's a work in progress and I will make sure to inform you with a solution.
Thank you!
Hello again Glenn.
You're overwriting Service's default settings (min and max capacity) through the employee's Assigned Services section:
To be correct, you're not overwriting, but mandating the minimum capacity with this. When I set the minimum capacity to be 1 in Employee/Assigned services, I'm able to book Canoeing (1Hr) with one additional person freely:
But when you create a minimum capacity per employee, that's making the minimum capacity of 4 people be mandatory, and it's overwriting the "Allow booking below minimum capacity".
So, if you reduce the minimum capacity of your employee for this (and all other conflicting services) to 1, it will work fine, and the service will use its capacity settings without overriding it with employee settings.
I reverted the minimum capacity for "Instructor 1", so it's on 4 again.
Kind Regards,
Aleksandar Vuković
[email protected]
Rate my support
wpDataTables: FAQ | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Front-end and back-end demo | Docs
Amelia: FAQ | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Amelia demo sites | Docs | Discord Community
You can try wpDataTables add-ons before purchasing on these sandbox sites:
Powerful Filters | Gravity Forms Integration for wpDataTables | Formidable Forms Integration for wpDataTables | Master-Detail Tables
Hi Aleksandar/Ivana,
Thank you for this! Though based on what you're saying, I think this would really benefit from the documentation being a bit clearer - it's not obvious that the Employee/Assigned Services capacity values will force the "Allow booking below minimum capacity" setting to stop working as expected. Even when looking at the database table for 'wp_amelia_providers_to_services', when a new Employee is created, they immediately inherit the minCapacity and maxCapacity.
I have updated the Canoeing settings from the Services and allowed it to update the Employee records. Is that the correct way to restore it to normal?
This at least appears to allow another booking to be added to an existing booking for an employee/timeslot if the total is under the maximum capacity, which is really helpful!
Unfortunately, setting the minimum capacity in each Employee to 1 creates a different problem where no minimum is used and the "Bringing anyone with you?" option is switched off by default.
If I set the minimum capacity to 4 within Services (and have that update the Employee/Assigned Services) this appears to now allow additional bookings on an existing booking timeslot up to the maximum, but does not allow a new booking to be made by someone under the minimum capacity.
(Edit: removed query about booking below minimum for brand-new bookings, as I realised this was not possible previously either.)
Thank you very much,
Glenn
I think I have a related problem.
We have one employee who can handle 60 attendees in every appointment.
We have two services (ticktets). The A ticket can be bought from 1 to 7 person. The B ticket can be bought from 8 to 60 person.
If I set the A service min capacity to 1 and max capacity to 7 and set the B service min capacity to 8 and max to 60, the customers can buy both tickets from 1 attendees to 60 attendees because the employee capacity overwrites the service capacity I think.
We would like that, if a customer could choose the A ticket from 1 to 7 attendees and the B ticket from 8 to 60 attendees but the employee capacity would be 60 attendees in every appointment.
Thank you very much,
Daniel
Hi Glenn,
thank you for the kind reply - and for the suggestion for documentation wording; I do apologize about the ambiguity of the text.
I have updated the Canoeing settings from the Services and allowed it to update the Employee records. Is that the correct way to restore it to normal?
It's immediately updating all following employees who are assigned to this service to match the updated values you made in the services accordingly.
If I set the minimum capacity to 4 within Services (and have that update the Employee/Assigned Services) this appears to now allow additional bookings on an existing booking timeslot up to the maximum, but does not allow a new booking to be made by someone under the minimum capacity.
This does cause a conflict; optionally you could change it for one employee, because chances are that for that employee's booking Amelia may allow this to be possible, however, in this particular case employee may override the service setting and allow a new booking for someone under a minimum, but I am concerned that this may cause you an overall conflict on another employee who works exact same service and has their capacity adjusted per the service setting you've updated.
Hi Bence; for your particular situation unfortunately, this is not possible - as I have advised Glenn, having different capacities may cause conflict, and disrupt the booking on the frontend for the customer.
One person can take 7 people however, they will still see 60 available; you can optionally add a note on the booking that you allow only 7 people per group. In this case everyone can see 60 available, however, they will be informed that they can book only 7 seats per person (per single booking group).