This morning I had a client report having two attempts to book with me for next Thursday cancelled and that's what the Emails to me show. She feels she didn't do anything to invoke those cancellations and I didn't. How might that have happened? How can I audit/sleuth/debug issues like that?
I have twice had clients tell me that they can't book things around another booking and as far as I can see what they are saying is that a 30 minute booking is blocking them from making a 60 minute one following it. I think that on at least one occasion I have been able to replicate this. I have not buffers set so this surely shouldn't happen. I could probably spend time trying to replicate this more carefully but that's something I would expect to do for a free, FLOSS program or plugin but not for this.
If I book myself out for a day's leave that doesn't show in the calendar view: unhelpful.
If I book myself out for a day's leave and then test that by trying to book an appointment on that day the system allows me all the way through to selecting a slot and confirming the request before telling me that slot is unavailable: that is wasting clients' time. I am the only employee so surely Amelia should show the day as unavailable?
This is not a free product, I am starting to worry that I have made a bad choice of plugin.
Thank you for purchasing our product, and for reaching out to us.
When you have questions or issues which are not related to the title of the active ticket, please open a new ticket, and we will help you there.
In that way, issues and questions which are related to different subjects will be in separate tickets so other customers or our support agents can find them easily.
Our policy is to have one issue or question per ticket because of the reasons that are described already.
Thank you for understanding.
1. We have tested and successfully booked 2 times on your site. "Cancellation" can only happen to them if they have not completed the booking process and tried to book multiple appointments at the same time. Unfortunately, this option is not available in Amelia and all appointments must be booked one by one.
2. If I book myself out for a day's leave that doesn't show in the calendar view: unhelpful. - when you block the something in the calendar then it is displayed in Amelia only in such a way that those days or the time slots will not be available for booking in Amelia.
You have option Remove Google Calendar Busy Slots in Google Settings in Amelia plugin. When you enable this option it will be removed the busy slots in your employees’ Google Calendars from their work schedules in Amelia. When enabled, time slots from the Amelia Calendar will be removed whenever there is an event in the Google Calendar.
Please note: In order for these slots to be removed the events in Google Calendar must be set as Busy.
3. Amelia does not show that the time slot is not available until the end of the booking process but instead at the beginning. If the integration with google calendar is done well and if remove busy sots are set up correctly then those days and thus the slots will not be available to be "selected" for booking in Amelia and the customer will not be able to click on them.
If you have any more questions please feel free to open another ticket.
That does not seem to address my overarching concern that I am getting very unimpressed with Amelia, actually, I am now far, far less impressed as this seems to be unsympathetic, all about how I have to work with you. You haven't answered the first question at all and your answers to the next two questions seem to assume that I am synching with Google calendar: I am not and have no intention of doing that.
"Thank you for understanding": I don't feel understanding and you have shown none. OK, maybe time to ask for a refund and resume the search for a good appointments plugin as this is close to being more trouble that it's worth. If you have a complaints process, please pass this up to that.
Firstly, I would like to sincerely apologize for the delayed response as we have been experiencing an unusually high number of tickets. I am sorry that it has taken longer than usual to respond to your concern and your patience is highly appreciated.
We are sorry that you feel this way, but we answered your first question. We tested and saw that everything was fine and that Amelia was working properly. And we couldn't replicate the issue.
Also, we told you the possible reason why this can happen. You told us that "She feels she didn't do anything to invoke those cancellations" but there is a possibility that she did something by mistake, we have tested as you could confirm on our screenshots that everything is looking good so there is nothing to debug at this moment.
In case this starts to happen to other customers then we would have more information and we could do some more testing. For now, we have tried everything we could and as far as we can see, everything is working as it should.
If you don't use Google Calendar and you don't want to, then of course you don't have to. But in order to be able to help you then you need to give us more information on how you are trying to "book myself out for a day's leave that doesn't show in the calendar view". Until you provide us with accurate information on how and where you are trying to do this, we cannot know exactly what you are doing and what is the best way to help you. Also, any screenshot would be helpful.
Once again, we are sorry that you feel this way and we are looking forward to your reply.
Look I realise there is a "lost in translation" issue here and I'm pretty fed up of trying to help with software that is malfunctioning and getting what sound to a native English speaker like defensive, brush off answers.
We are sorry that you feel this way, but we answered your first question. We tested and saw that everything was fine and that Amelia was working properly. And we couldn't replicate the issue.
For a serious software product that strikes me as completely inadequate. I am very, very familiar with software and debugging, the person reporting that is intelligent and will not have done anything stupid. I was telling you in the hope that it might resonate with other reports. It doesn't so all you needed to have said to that was "Sorry to hear that, we're not getting other reports of that." However, I also assumed that as Amelia is a complex piece of software working inside another complex piece of (definitely imperfect) software, i.e. WordPress, that you might have logging, or additional layers of logging that could be switched on and would be willing to do that.
Also, we told you the possible reason why this can happen. You told us that "She feels she didn't do anything to invoke those cancellations" but there is a possibility that she did something by mistake, we have tested as you could confirm on our screenshots that everything is looking good so there is nothing to debug at this moment.
So two tests by you that worked make you suspect that two fails by an intelligent person, reported to you by another, means there is nothing wrong? No, as your next comment says...
In case this starts to happen to other customers then we would have more information
Well you won't have more information if you dismiss those too!
and we could do some more testing. For now, we have tried everything we could and as far as we can see, everything is working as it should.
But it didn't.
If you don't use Google Calendar and you don't want to, then of course you don't have to.
And nothing in what I'd said suggested I was using it. Why did you jump to the assumption I was?
But in order to be able to help you then you need to give us more information on how you are trying to "book myself out for a day's leave that doesn't show in the calendar view".
How do you imagine I did it? It's really rather insulting and high handed to jump to telling me how to help you. You are supposed to be helping me. How about asking nicely: "Please can you tell us how you booked yourself out? Was it ..."
I went into the Amelia dashboard/control panel, I went to employees, I went to me (the only "employee"), I went to "edit employee" and then to days off and booked the day off.
Until you provide us with accurate information on how and where you are trying to do this, we cannot know exactly what you are doing and what is the best way to help you. Also, any screenshot would be helpful.
I can't really see how I can, or would need to, screen shot that.
Once again, we are sorry that you feel this way and we are looking forward to your reply.
Once again. I would very, very strongly recommend you talk with someone else in Amelia about your approach to who is trying to help whom here. You should not be coming across like someone teaching me to help you. You may have a wonderful product, I see good things in it. I am also seeing a number of things that are suboptimal for me and getting reports from clients of things not working as they should. I am reporting them to you certainly in the hope that you will tell me ways around some things (I will try the ics and agree with you it's not a great way to get that functionality I need but at least appreciate that someone supplied it). However, I am also reporting them to you in the hope that yours is an intelligent company that knows that customer feedback will help you and that polite and constructive helpline responses will get you good reviews and rude and unhelpful responses won't. That's your, and your company's problem and challenge. Please think about it and don't just come back with either rather unconvincing "nice bits" (first and last paragraph of your message) ... just think if you have better ways to do this.
I'm sorry to see you're unsatisfied with the support provided by Marko here. Let me try and cover this ticket from the beginning.
1. Amelia can't cancel any appointments on its own. If the appointments were not canceled manually by the client, yourself, another admin, or any Amelia Managers (since you said you're the only employee, I don't know if you have any managers or other administrators on the site) the only other option that's left is a link checker. I booked an appointment for April 21st, and received an email where the cancelation link is included:
What link checkers do is they validate each URL that's in the email, and in order to do that they have to visit the URL. Those can be built into the end user's mailing platform, or they could be add-ons for the browser or the email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc). When they visit the cancelation URL (to check for potential viruses), they cancel the appointment. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do in this case. The only workaround would be to create a Front-end Customer Panel and explain the procedure in the email, like:
"To cancel your appointment, please log in to your Customer panel, and click on the pencil symbol. There you'll see the "Cancel" option."
2. As for this: "a 30 minute booking is blocking them from making a 60 minute one following it" - I don't see any potential issues here. You've enabled "Use service duration for booking a time slot", so the duration of the appointment determines the available time slots. In the appointment I booked above, I booked the time slot at 7:00 AM, so the next available appointment is at 07:30 for both "30 minute" and "50 minute" services. The previously booked appointment does affect time slots, so if (in the beginning) 07:00 AM is offered, and someone books a "30 minute" appointment at 07:00, it will move the next available time slot to 07:30. If someone was to book a "50 minute" appointment at 07:00, it will move the next time slot to 08:00 AM. If you could explain in a bit more detail what the actual issue is here, I'll gladly explain Amelia's behavior, but from what I can see at this time is that it's working as expected.
3. "If I book myself out for a day's leave" - do you mean if you add a "Day Off" for the employee (since you mentioned you don't use Google Calendar, I assume you are referring to this)? When you add a day off in your employee's schedule, in the Calendar on the back-end, the entire day is grayed out, like this:
It's not that dark to be noticeable straight away, but it does block it. Also, on the front-end, that day is crossed out:
Please tell me what I'm missing here - is there anything else you may be doing, or am I missing viewing something either in the front-end or in the back-end?
4. "If I book myself out for a day's leave and then test that by trying to book an appointment on that day the system allows me all the way through to selecting a slot and confirming the request before telling me that slot is unavailable" - as you can see in my screenshots above - that should not be possible, so please tell me how you're blocking your day? Would you be able to record your screen showing me what you're doing?
I'll do my best to help you out here, but I need to understand what it is exactly you're doing on your side in order to be able to replicate it.
Sorry for all the back and forth and sorry for the bad experience so far.
#1. Ah, that makes perfect sense so why didn't Marko suggest that may have happened? I think you could do with a big warning about this. I have deleted the link to the cancellation URL. For now I will leave it like that and assume that people will contact me if they need to cancel as I don't think they or I need the customer panel.
#2. But the 30 minute bookings push the base times for the rest of the day to turn on the 30 minute mark. Have a look at Selection_021.png which shows how the booking you made has had that effect. I now want to make a booking for 50 minutes at 09.00 but it's not obvious how to do that. Can you explain how I can change things so that the bookings are allowed on the half hour and on the hour even if a 30 minute booking has been made earlier.
#3 and #4 seem to be the same. All I can say is that after definitely booking a "Day Off" (synonymous with "Day's leave" at least in UK English) the front end did NOT block the day and allowed me to get all the way into a booking before telling me that booking was impossible.
#5 "Sorry for all the back and forth and sorry for the bad experience so far." OK. It has not been good and I am continuing to find much counterintuitive. Perhaps it works well for a big organisations and/or for people who are anchored by Google calendar but so far it hasn't been good for me.
#6. Your latest update detail is blank. See Selection_022.png.
#1 We'll add this as a warning somewhere in our documentation I just have to figure out the best place to put it (do you have any recommendations, on which page should this go?). I'll also create an article here, in this ticketing platform as soon as I'm done with this ticket. I can't speak for Marko, but most likely he forgot about this issue since it's not that common. I have already spoken with him about this yesterday. Once again - sorry for the inconvenience.
#2 This is expected behavior since the 30-minute appointment blocks the 30 minutes. The next available time slot depends on the initial booked appointment. If someone was to book a 50-minute long service, the next time slot would be at 08:00 (since the duration of the service is 1 hour), but since a 30-minute long service was booked, the next time slot is at 07:30. If another customer booked this time slot, the next available one would be at 08:00, but if the 2nd customer booked a 50-minute class, the next time slot would be at 08:30. This is the logic of the plugin.
Buffer times in the 30-minute service would affect that service, so once 07:00 is booked, the 07:30 time slot would disappear. Another option of disabling "Use service duration for booking a time slot" is also out of the question since that would make the 50-minute service offer appointments every 30 minutes (or whatever time slot you have defined in Amelia's General Settings).
The only way you can make it work so when someone books a 30-minute service, it doesn't affect the full-hour availability of your 50-minute service would be to configure your employee's work hours like this (this is my local installation):
On the front-end, when 07:30 is booked, the 50-minute service would look like this:
While the 30-minute service would be unchanged:
Since you'd add 1-hour work periods, as soon as someone books the 07:00 time slot for a 30-minute service, the 50-minute service will not be available at 07:30 (because it can't be completed until 08:00). The unfortunate thing here is that you need to add these work periods one by one, by clicking on the + sign in the top right. You can apply it to all days and then click on the - symbol if some of these are to be deleted for other days.
It would take you around 10 minutes to configure this, but at the moment it's the only workaround for what you're trying to achieve. Let me know if you need some assistance with this.
#3 and #4 Can you please go to Amelia/Employees and add a Day Off for your employee? Set it to be some day in the future (for example, June 10th, 2022), and let me know, so I can check it out from my end.
#5 I'll do my best to make it work for you. If I'm not able to, we'll refund your purchase since you bought the plugin fairly recently. We don't want any unsatisfied customers, so if I'm not able to help you out with setting up Amelia the way you want it, we'll see to it that you at least get your money back. I'd hate to see this happen, but I can understand the situation.
#6 WordPress is using wordpress.org repository, where Amelia's Lite version is hosted. Since the latest Lite version is v1.0.50, WordPress can't see any details of v4.6. The update goes directly from our online store, and you can view the changelog here.
#1 Useful warning but will people see that. I had an afterthought: the systems that handle peer-reviewing give you buttons in their Emails to accept or reject the offer. I have been puzzled for a while that when you click those buttons you get a page with a further button asking you to confirm your decision. I had thought this was just them hoping you'd change your mind but I think I can now see that this gets around the issue you are describing where some link checker triggers a response. Might it be safer to ask for a "two click cancellation"?
#2 I still don't really understand this. If I have an empty day starting at 07.00, and someone books a 30 minute slot for 07.00 and no buffers set (I haven't got any set) surely I'm free for any further booking, whether 30 minute or 50 minute (my two options) at 07.30, 08.00, 08.30, 09.00 ... so why is the booking system now only offering people 07.30, 08.30, 09.30 ...? This makes no sense to me at all and your solution looked very convoluted. Does it improve if I set my 30 minute slot to be a 29 minute slot?
#4 Days off. I booked 9th of June off and can confirm it doesn't offer it now so that is great. I wonder if I had added the day off but not also pressed "save" last time. There are many things in Amelia that don't require a "save" confirmation, e.g. changing appointments from pending to approved so perhaps I overlooked that. Having said that, the day definitely is NOT greyed out in my back end calendar. See Selection_023.png (and I had refreshed the page, twice, including with ctrl-F5 so this shouldn't be a cacheing issue).
1. That's a good suggestion. I forwarded it to our development team, and they already created a task to look into this for one of our future updates.
2. The thing here is that the plugin's logic is set with the "Use service duration for booking a time slot" in Amelia's General Settings. So, when this is enabled, the "Default time slot step" is ignored, and the duration of the service is applied. When someone books an appointment from 07:00 - 07:30, the next time slot is at 07:30. Since you're "using service duration for booking a time slot", the 50-minute service (1-hour duration) is applied and you'll see time slots at 07:30, 08:30, 09:30, etc. If you want to allow 07:30, 08:00, 08:30, 09:00 - basically a free selection which is based on the time slot step, you'd need to go in to Amelia's General Settings, set the "default time slot step" to be "30 minutes", and then disable "Use service duration for booking a time slot" below it.
When you do this, your customers would be able to book an appointment every 30 minutes. However, if they book an appointment at 08:00, at 07:30, you'll still have a time slot for the "30-minute" service. Also, if the entire day is free, your customers will see 07:00, 07:30, 08:00, 08:30, and so on. So, if someone books a 50-minute appointment at 08:30, the next available time slot for this service will be at 09:30, then at 10:00, 10:30, etc. And before that, the available slots will be at 07:00 and 07:30. The duration of the service blocks 08:00 and 09:00 (since the appointment lasts 1 hour).
Let me know if this is clear. I can record a video for you explaining all possibilities.
4. I'm glad to hear the day is finally blocked in the calendar, but for the grayed-out day in the back-end - I can't say why that's happening (I can't replicate it on my end). Can you provide me with temporary log-in credentials (admin) for your site in a PRIVATE response, so I can take a look?
#2 Perfect. Perhaps I should have understood that or perhaps more popup help would have stopped me misunderstanding that. (Could you have a "beginner" mode offering popup before we select any option versus an "expert" mode that wouldn't? I realise that's a big change but might save things like this.)
#3 OK I will at some point but first I'll experiment to see if it's consistent across browsers (and perhaps OS, I use Ubuntu mostly but do have to have Windoze around). That will nail whether it's specific to something like that. (Do your demo sites allow someone to set a day off for a slave, oops, I mean employee? That would enable me to check this for my browsers on your servers.) I won't have time for this or giving you direct access for a while but you have fixed my main concerns as of now so thanks.
#2 - Can you please explain in more detail? I don't understand if you want this to be in Amelia's settings, or like an option for front-end bookings?
#3 - Most of us here (including our developers) are on Ubuntu. Some are using Macs, and no one is on Windows. The plugin is fully compatible with Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Safari, and Opera and it can't be related to the OS, since it's on WordPress - completely unrelated to the OS.
You can log in to the back-end of our Sports Demo and make whatever changes you need - like a sandbox site with the full plugin installed, so you can play around with it. Demo sites are refreshed every 15th minute of every hour, so make sure not to start working with it at 12:10 (for example), because all your changes will be lost 5 minutes later, and reverted to default settings.
Another thing that could make the calendar not gray out the date is the "Allow admin to book an appointment at any time" setting in Amelia/Settings/Roles/Admin. When you enable this, you (an admin) are able to book any time with this employee, regardless of his work hours, so you would see the calendar from 00 - 24h.
Hope you had a good holiday by the time you get to this!
#2. I'll try. Amelia is, of course, a pretty complicated thing. It's trying to cover a huge diversity of needs from large companies with multiple employees and perhaps very diverse services through to single handed entities like me. You are also trying to make the front end configurable and quite diverse in how it looks and workswhich is correct of course. You are also having to make sure it works on a not particularly wonderful platform of WP and to make sure it collaborates with Gurgle diary and M$soft (if I remember rightly) and with many different finance handling systems. That means that the dashboard is bound to be complicated and I don't find all of it intuitive I particularly don't find the Settings submenu intuitive. I like the "?" help but often what pops up tells me less than I really need (could you put links in some to more information). I suspect you could also organise the headings to give more guidance. However, the key point I was trying to make is that I think that for many of your customers I think there will be two very distinct ways they interact with the dashboard: (A) the first time, setting up the basics for what they will do with Amelia; (B) all the subsequent times when much might be familiar. I think there may be two subgroups in your customers: (1) those who create WP sites as their main job; (2) people like me who wish they could spend less time in WP and more in the rest of our lives(!) I was suggesting that you might plan for two modes so that particularly customers in group (2) doing (A) have a wizard or much more help to take them through the set up. I clearly didn't understand the relationship between "Use service duration for booking a time slot" and "Default time slot step" is ignored. I probably could have spent even more time with your web pages but I think I might still have missed that. Some greater help, e.g. a warning on each of those about how they interact, might have helped but I recognise that your customers in group (1) probably don't need that and might even find it irritating.
#3 you have more faith in browser consistency across OS platforms than me but you're correct, that's a red herring. It was "Allow admin to book an appointment at any time" setting in Amelia/Settings/Roles/Admin. I have no idea if I set that or if it's default but again it feels odd that it can be there and not recognised as the explanation earlier. Incidentally I again left the day off page having hit the "add" button but not the "save" button. I think there's a real inconsistency in the dashboard between the many things that need no confirmation and this which needs double confirmation. Could you prompt when someone has made a change and goes to leave the page without hitting "save"?
OK. Enough free user experience testing from me for a while (I hope). I do hope you can create a way to customise the ics messages without having to go into the database tables: that's the remaining real disappointment for me that I have ics that's really not terribly helpful.
Also, thank you for your feedback. I'll make sure to forward this to our developers and product managers, so they can plan some changes in the future. As you said - it's quite difficult to cover every scenario with hundreds of industries out there, but we'll do our best.
If you need some further assistance, please feel free to reach out to us.
I am starting to be quite concerned about Amelia.
This is not a free product, I am starting to worry that I have made a bad choice of plugin.
Hello Chris,
Thank you for purchasing our product, and for reaching out to us.
When you have questions or issues which are not related to the title of the active ticket, please open a new ticket, and we will help you there.
In that way, issues and questions which are related to different subjects will be in separate tickets so other customers or our support agents can find them easily.
Our policy is to have one issue or question per ticket because of the reasons that are described already.
Thank you for understanding.
1. We have tested and successfully booked 2 times on your site. "Cancellation" can only happen to them if they have not completed the booking process and tried to book multiple appointments at the same time. Unfortunately, this option is not available in Amelia and all appointments must be booked one by one.
2. If I book myself out for a day's leave that doesn't show in the calendar view: unhelpful. - when you block the something in the calendar then it is displayed in Amelia only in such a way that those days or the time slots will not be available for booking in Amelia.
You have option Remove Google Calendar Busy Slots in Google Settings in Amelia plugin. When you enable this option it will be removed the busy slots in your employees’ Google Calendars from their work schedules in Amelia. When enabled, time slots from the Amelia Calendar will be removed whenever there is an event in the Google Calendar.
Please note: In order for these slots to be removed the events in Google Calendar must be set as Busy.
You can read more in our documentation about Configuring Google Calendar in the Amelia WordPress Booking Plugin.
3. Amelia does not show that the time slot is not available until the end of the booking process but instead at the beginning. If the integration with google calendar is done well and if remove busy sots are set up correctly then those days and thus the slots will not be available to be "selected" for booking in Amelia and the customer will not be able to click on them.
If you have any more questions please feel free to open another ticket.
Kind Regards,
Marko Davidovic [email protected]
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That does not seem to address my overarching concern that I am getting very unimpressed with Amelia, actually, I am now far, far less impressed as this seems to be unsympathetic, all about how I have to work with you. You haven't answered the first question at all and your answers to the next two questions seem to assume that I am synching with Google calendar: I am not and have no intention of doing that.
"Thank you for understanding": I don't feel understanding and you have shown none. OK, maybe time to ask for a refund and resume the search for a good appointments plugin as this is close to being more trouble that it's worth. If you have a complaints process, please pass this up to that.
Hello Chris,
Firstly, I would like to sincerely apologize for the delayed response as we have been experiencing an unusually high number of tickets. I am sorry that it has taken longer than usual to respond to your concern and your patience is highly appreciated.
We are sorry that you feel this way, but we answered your first question. We tested and saw that everything was fine and that Amelia was working properly. And we couldn't replicate the issue.
Also, we told you the possible reason why this can happen. You told us that "She feels she didn't do anything to invoke those cancellations" but there is a possibility that she did something by mistake, we have tested as you could confirm on our screenshots that everything is looking good so there is nothing to debug at this moment.
In case this starts to happen to other customers then we would have more information and we could do some more testing. For now, we have tried everything we could and as far as we can see, everything is working as it should.
If you don't use Google Calendar and you don't want to, then of course you don't have to. But in order to be able to help you then you need to give us more information on how you are trying to "book myself out for a day's leave that doesn't show in the calendar view". Until you provide us with accurate information on how and where you are trying to do this, we cannot know exactly what you are doing and what is the best way to help you. Also, any screenshot would be helpful.
Once again, we are sorry that you feel this way and we are looking forward to your reply.
Kind Regards,
Marko Davidovic [email protected]
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Look I realise there is a "lost in translation" issue here and I'm pretty fed up of trying to help with software that is malfunctioning and getting what sound to a native English speaker like defensive, brush off answers.
We are sorry that you feel this way, but we answered your first question. We tested and saw that everything was fine and that Amelia was working properly. And we couldn't replicate the issue.
For a serious software product that strikes me as completely inadequate. I am very, very familiar with software and debugging, the person reporting that is intelligent and will not have done anything stupid. I was telling you in the hope that it might resonate with other reports. It doesn't so all you needed to have said to that was "Sorry to hear that, we're not getting other reports of that." However, I also assumed that as Amelia is a complex piece of software working inside another complex piece of (definitely imperfect) software, i.e. WordPress, that you might have logging, or additional layers of logging that could be switched on and would be willing to do that.
Also, we told you the possible reason why this can happen. You told us that "She feels she didn't do anything to invoke those cancellations" but there is a possibility that she did something by mistake, we have tested as you could confirm on our screenshots that everything is looking good so there is nothing to debug at this moment.
So two tests by you that worked make you suspect that two fails by an intelligent person, reported to you by another, means there is nothing wrong? No, as your next comment says...
In case this starts to happen to other customers then we would have more information
Well you won't have more information if you dismiss those too!
and we could do some more testing. For now, we have tried everything we could and as far as we can see, everything is working as it should.
But it didn't.
If you don't use Google Calendar and you don't want to, then of course you don't have to.
And nothing in what I'd said suggested I was using it. Why did you jump to the assumption I was?
But in order to be able to help you then you need to give us more information on how you are trying to "book myself out for a day's leave that doesn't show in the calendar view".
How do you imagine I did it? It's really rather insulting and high handed to jump to telling me how to help you. You are supposed to be helping me. How about asking nicely: "Please can you tell us how you booked yourself out? Was it ..."
I went into the Amelia dashboard/control panel, I went to employees, I went to me (the only "employee"), I went to "edit employee" and then to days off and booked the day off.
Until you provide us with accurate information on how and where you are trying to do this, we cannot know exactly what you are doing and what is the best way to help you. Also, any screenshot would be helpful.
I can't really see how I can, or would need to, screen shot that.
Once again, we are sorry that you feel this way and we are looking forward to your reply.
Once again. I would very, very strongly recommend you talk with someone else in Amelia about your approach to who is trying to help whom here. You should not be coming across like someone teaching me to help you. You may have a wonderful product, I see good things in it. I am also seeing a number of things that are suboptimal for me and getting reports from clients of things not working as they should. I am reporting them to you certainly in the hope that you will tell me ways around some things (I will try the ics and agree with you it's not a great way to get that functionality I need but at least appreciate that someone supplied it). However, I am also reporting them to you in the hope that yours is an intelligent company that knows that customer feedback will help you and that polite and constructive helpline responses will get you good reviews and rude and unhelpful responses won't. That's your, and your company's problem and challenge. Please think about it and don't just come back with either rather unconvincing "nice bits" (first and last paragraph of your message) ... just think if you have better ways to do this.
Hi Chris
I'm sorry to see you're unsatisfied with the support provided by Marko here. Let me try and cover this ticket from the beginning.
1. Amelia can't cancel any appointments on its own. If the appointments were not canceled manually by the client, yourself, another admin, or any Amelia Managers (since you said you're the only employee, I don't know if you have any managers or other administrators on the site) the only other option that's left is a link checker. I booked an appointment for April 21st, and received an email where the cancelation link is included:
What link checkers do is they validate each URL that's in the email, and in order to do that they have to visit the URL. Those can be built into the end user's mailing platform, or they could be add-ons for the browser or the email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc). When they visit the cancelation URL (to check for potential viruses), they cancel the appointment. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do in this case. The only workaround would be to create a Front-end Customer Panel and explain the procedure in the email, like:
"To cancel your appointment, please log in to your Customer panel, and click on the pencil symbol. There you'll see the "Cancel" option."
2. As for this: "a 30 minute booking is blocking them from making a 60 minute one following it" - I don't see any potential issues here. You've enabled "Use service duration for booking a time slot", so the duration of the appointment determines the available time slots. In the appointment I booked above, I booked the time slot at 7:00 AM, so the next available appointment is at 07:30 for both "30 minute" and "50 minute" services. The previously booked appointment does affect time slots, so if (in the beginning) 07:00 AM is offered, and someone books a "30 minute" appointment at 07:00, it will move the next available time slot to 07:30. If someone was to book a "50 minute" appointment at 07:00, it will move the next time slot to 08:00 AM. If you could explain in a bit more detail what the actual issue is here, I'll gladly explain Amelia's behavior, but from what I can see at this time is that it's working as expected.
3. "If I book myself out for a day's leave" - do you mean if you add a "Day Off" for the employee (since you mentioned you don't use Google Calendar, I assume you are referring to this)? When you add a day off in your employee's schedule, in the Calendar on the back-end, the entire day is grayed out, like this:
It's not that dark to be noticeable straight away, but it does block it. Also, on the front-end, that day is crossed out:
Please tell me what I'm missing here - is there anything else you may be doing, or am I missing viewing something either in the front-end or in the back-end?
4. "If I book myself out for a day's leave and then test that by trying to book an appointment on that day the system allows me all the way through to selecting a slot and confirming the request before telling me that slot is unavailable" - as you can see in my screenshots above - that should not be possible, so please tell me how you're blocking your day? Would you be able to record your screen showing me what you're doing?
I'll do my best to help you out here, but I need to understand what it is exactly you're doing on your side in order to be able to replicate it.
Sorry for all the back and forth and sorry for the bad experience so far.
Kind Regards,
Aleksandar Vuković
[email protected]
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#1. Ah, that makes perfect sense so why didn't Marko suggest that may have happened? I think you could do with a big warning about this. I have deleted the link to the cancellation URL. For now I will leave it like that and assume that people will contact me if they need to cancel as I don't think they or I need the customer panel.
#2. But the 30 minute bookings push the base times for the rest of the day to turn on the 30 minute mark. Have a look at Selection_021.png which shows how the booking you made has had that effect. I now want to make a booking for 50 minutes at 09.00 but it's not obvious how to do that. Can you explain how I can change things so that the bookings are allowed on the half hour and on the hour even if a 30 minute booking has been made earlier.
#3 and #4 seem to be the same. All I can say is that after definitely booking a "Day Off" (synonymous with "Day's leave" at least in UK English) the front end did NOT block the day and allowed me to get all the way into a booking before telling me that booking was impossible.
#5 "Sorry for all the back and forth and sorry for the bad experience so far."
OK. It has not been good and I am continuing to find much counterintuitive. Perhaps it works well for a big organisations and/or for people who are anchored by Google calendar but so far it hasn't been good for me.
#6. Your latest update detail is blank. See Selection_022.png.
Hi again Chris.
#1 We'll add this as a warning somewhere in our documentation I just have to figure out the best place to put it (do you have any recommendations, on which page should this go?). I'll also create an article here, in this ticketing platform as soon as I'm done with this ticket. I can't speak for Marko, but most likely he forgot about this issue since it's not that common. I have already spoken with him about this yesterday. Once again - sorry for the inconvenience.
#2 This is expected behavior since the 30-minute appointment blocks the 30 minutes. The next available time slot depends on the initial booked appointment. If someone was to book a 50-minute long service, the next time slot would be at 08:00 (since the duration of the service is 1 hour), but since a 30-minute long service was booked, the next time slot is at 07:30. If another customer booked this time slot, the next available one would be at 08:00, but if the 2nd customer booked a 50-minute class, the next time slot would be at 08:30. This is the logic of the plugin.
Buffer times in the 30-minute service would affect that service, so once 07:00 is booked, the 07:30 time slot would disappear. Another option of disabling "Use service duration for booking a time slot" is also out of the question since that would make the 50-minute service offer appointments every 30 minutes (or whatever time slot you have defined in Amelia's General Settings).
The only way you can make it work so when someone books a 30-minute service, it doesn't affect the full-hour availability of your 50-minute service would be to configure your employee's work hours like this (this is my local installation):
On the front-end, when 07:30 is booked, the 50-minute service would look like this:
While the 30-minute service would be unchanged:
Since you'd add 1-hour work periods, as soon as someone books the 07:00 time slot for a 30-minute service, the 50-minute service will not be available at 07:30 (because it can't be completed until 08:00). The unfortunate thing here is that you need to add these work periods one by one, by clicking on the + sign in the top right. You can apply it to all days and then click on the - symbol if some of these are to be deleted for other days.
It would take you around 10 minutes to configure this, but at the moment it's the only workaround for what you're trying to achieve. Let me know if you need some assistance with this.
#3 and #4 Can you please go to Amelia/Employees and add a Day Off for your employee? Set it to be some day in the future (for example, June 10th, 2022), and let me know, so I can check it out from my end.
#5 I'll do my best to make it work for you. If I'm not able to, we'll refund your purchase since you bought the plugin fairly recently. We don't want any unsatisfied customers, so if I'm not able to help you out with setting up Amelia the way you want it, we'll see to it that you at least get your money back. I'd hate to see this happen, but I can understand the situation.
#6 WordPress is using wordpress.org repository, where Amelia's Lite version is hosted. Since the latest Lite version is v1.0.50, WordPress can't see any details of v4.6. The update goes directly from our online store, and you can view the changelog here.
Kind Regards,
Aleksandar Vuković
[email protected]
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Just wanted to let you know that I created a new article about this, Chris:
https://tmsplugins.ticksy.com/article/18078/
Do let me know if you have any questions or suggestions about my previous response.
Kind Regards,
Aleksandar Vuković
[email protected]
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#1 Useful warning but will people see that. I had an afterthought: the systems that handle peer-reviewing give you buttons in their Emails to accept or reject the offer. I have been puzzled for a while that when you click those buttons you get a page with a further button asking you to confirm your decision. I had thought this was just them hoping you'd change your mind but I think I can now see that this gets around the issue you are describing where some link checker triggers a response. Might it be safer to ask for a "two click cancellation"?
#2 I still don't really understand this. If I have an empty day starting at 07.00, and someone books a 30 minute slot for 07.00 and no buffers set (I haven't got any set) surely I'm free for any further booking, whether 30 minute or 50 minute (my two options) at 07.30, 08.00, 08.30, 09.00 ... so why is the booking system now only offering people 07.30, 08.30, 09.30 ...? This makes no sense to me at all and your solution looked very convoluted. Does it improve if I set my 30 minute slot to be a 29 minute slot?
#4 Days off. I booked 9th of June off and can confirm it doesn't offer it now so that is great. I wonder if I had added the day off but not also pressed "save" last time. There are many things in Amelia that don't require a "save" confirmation, e.g. changing appointments from pending to approved so perhaps I overlooked that. Having said that, the day definitely is NOT greyed out in my back end calendar. See Selection_023.png (and I had refreshed the page, twice, including with ctrl-F5 so this shouldn't be a cacheing issue).
Hi again Chris.
1. That's a good suggestion. I forwarded it to our development team, and they already created a task to look into this for one of our future updates.
2. The thing here is that the plugin's logic is set with the "Use service duration for booking a time slot" in Amelia's General Settings. So, when this is enabled, the "Default time slot step" is ignored, and the duration of the service is applied. When someone books an appointment from 07:00 - 07:30, the next time slot is at 07:30. Since you're "using service duration for booking a time slot", the 50-minute service (1-hour duration) is applied and you'll see time slots at 07:30, 08:30, 09:30, etc. If you want to allow 07:30, 08:00, 08:30, 09:00 - basically a free selection which is based on the time slot step, you'd need to go in to Amelia's General Settings, set the "default time slot step" to be "30 minutes", and then disable "Use service duration for booking a time slot" below it.
When you do this, your customers would be able to book an appointment every 30 minutes. However, if they book an appointment at 08:00, at 07:30, you'll still have a time slot for the "30-minute" service. Also, if the entire day is free, your customers will see 07:00, 07:30, 08:00, 08:30, and so on. So, if someone books a 50-minute appointment at 08:30, the next available time slot for this service will be at 09:30, then at 10:00, 10:30, etc. And before that, the available slots will be at 07:00 and 07:30. The duration of the service blocks 08:00 and 09:00 (since the appointment lasts 1 hour).
Let me know if this is clear. I can record a video for you explaining all possibilities.
4. I'm glad to hear the day is finally blocked in the calendar, but for the grayed-out day in the back-end - I can't say why that's happening (I can't replicate it on my end). Can you provide me with temporary log-in credentials (admin) for your site in a PRIVATE response, so I can take a look?
Kind Regards,
Aleksandar Vuković
[email protected]
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#1 Grand
#2 Perfect. Perhaps I should have understood that or perhaps more popup help would have stopped me misunderstanding that. (Could you have a "beginner" mode offering popup before we select any option versus an "expert" mode that wouldn't? I realise that's a big change but might save things like this.)
#3 OK I will at some point but first I'll experiment to see if it's consistent across browsers (and perhaps OS, I use Ubuntu mostly but do have to have Windoze around). That will nail whether it's specific to something like that. (Do your demo sites allow someone to set a day off for a slave, oops, I mean employee? That would enable me to check this for my browsers on your servers.) I won't have time for this or giving you direct access for a while but you have fixed my main concerns as of now so thanks.
Hi again Chris
#2 - Can you please explain in more detail? I don't understand if you want this to be in Amelia's settings, or like an option for front-end bookings?
#3 - Most of us here (including our developers) are on Ubuntu. Some are using Macs, and no one is on Windows. The plugin is fully compatible with Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Safari, and Opera and it can't be related to the OS, since it's on WordPress - completely unrelated to the OS.
You can log in to the back-end of our Sports Demo and make whatever changes you need - like a sandbox site with the full plugin installed, so you can play around with it. Demo sites are refreshed every 15th minute of every hour, so make sure not to start working with it at 12:10 (for example), because all your changes will be lost 5 minutes later, and reverted to default settings.
Another thing that could make the calendar not gray out the date is the "Allow admin to book an appointment at any time" setting in Amelia/Settings/Roles/Admin. When you enable this, you (an admin) are able to book any time with this employee, regardless of his work hours, so you would see the calendar from 00 - 24h.
Let me know if that helps.
Kind Regards,
Aleksandar Vuković
[email protected]
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Hope you had a good holiday by the time you get to this!
#2. I'll try. Amelia is, of course, a pretty complicated thing. It's trying to cover a huge diversity of needs from large companies with multiple employees and perhaps very diverse services through to single handed entities like me. You are also trying to make the front end configurable and quite diverse in how it looks and workswhich is correct of course. You are also having to make sure it works on a not particularly wonderful platform of WP and to make sure it collaborates with Gurgle diary and M$soft (if I remember rightly) and with many different finance handling systems. That means that the dashboard is bound to be complicated and I don't find all of it intuitive I particularly don't find the Settings submenu intuitive. I like the "?" help but often what pops up tells me less than I really need (could you put links in some to more information). I suspect you could also organise the headings to give more guidance. However, the key point I was trying to make is that I think that for many of your customers I think there will be two very distinct ways they interact with the dashboard: (A) the first time, setting up the basics for what they will do with Amelia; (B) all the subsequent times when much might be familiar. I think there may be two subgroups in your customers: (1) those who create WP sites as their main job; (2) people like me who wish they could spend less time in WP and more in the rest of our lives(!) I was suggesting that you might plan for two modes so that particularly customers in group (2) doing (A) have a wizard or much more help to take them through the set up. I clearly didn't understand the relationship between "Use service duration for booking a time slot" and "Default time slot step" is ignored. I probably could have spent even more time with your web pages but I think I might still have missed that. Some greater help, e.g. a warning on each of those about how they interact, might have helped but I recognise that your customers in group (1) probably don't need that and might even find it irritating.
#3 you have more faith in browser consistency across OS platforms than me but you're correct, that's a red herring. It was "Allow admin to book an appointment at any time" setting in Amelia/Settings/Roles/Admin. I have no idea if I set that or if it's default but again it feels odd that it can be there and not recognised as the explanation earlier. Incidentally I again left the day off page having hit the "add" button but not the "save" button. I think there's a real inconsistency in the dashboard between the many things that need no confirmation and this which needs double confirmation. Could you prompt when someone has made a change and goes to leave the page without hitting "save"?
OK. Enough free user experience testing from me for a while (I hope). I do hope you can create a way to customise the ics messages without having to go into the database tables: that's the remaining real disappointment for me that I have ics that's really not terribly helpful.
It was nice, thank you Chris.
Also, thank you for your feedback. I'll make sure to forward this to our developers and product managers, so they can plan some changes in the future. As you said - it's quite difficult to cover every scenario with hundreds of industries out there, but we'll do our best.
If you need some further assistance, please feel free to reach out to us.
Kind Regards,
Aleksandar Vuković
[email protected]
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