As part of our ongoing mission to make Helm Tickets more accessible to the thousands of organisers that use our software around the globe, we’ve introduced new localisation features for events, assets and organiser profiles. These changes will help your current and future events to run even more smoothly, no matter where you are in the world. 

While individually these may not seem like huge changes, individually they’ll go a long way to supporting both organisers and ticket buyers outside of the UK going forward.  

Localised times for events and users 

With Helm Tickets expanding further around the world, it’s important that dates and times are displayed correctly and clearly to all users – both organisers and ticket buyers. 

This feature includes a new time zone setting for your events. This setting allows you to set the time zone the event takes place in, and applies to any other times and dates set within your event, for example, ticket on sale from and to dates and times. 

For example:   

If you’re hosting a conference at 9 am in New York (EST, GMT-6) but the attendee is visiting from Los Angeles (PST, GMT-8), what time should be displayed – the time local to the event, or the time local to the current user? 

Previously, this was ambiguous and there was no clear way of knowing, but now it’s much clearer, with the ability to manually set a time zone. 

User’s timezone

The user’s timezone can be set from their profile page. If the person currently viewing the website doesn’t have an account (or is registering), our platform guesses what their time zone is, based on either their browser settings or IP address. 

This time zone will be used to display any dates on the website that don’t directly relate to an event’s time slot. For example, see when an order was made or refund was processed, when an invoice is due, or when a member of the reserve list was last notified. 

Event time zone

When creating or editing an event, you can set an explicit time zone against it. By default, it will select your time zone (if you’re the event organiser), but you can change this.  

The time zone you choose (or your time zone if you leave it as the default) is the time zone that all event slots will be displayed in. Everywhere an event’s time slots are displayed will be in this timezone, usually with a clarification added to it. This helps all times be consistent and make it easy for your attendees to understand what time the event will take place at, in the time zone local to the event itself. 

Updated Language Settings 

We’ve also introduced a language setting that allows you to choose between English (United Kingdom) and English (United States), and we’re planning to add in further languages at a later date. 

Until now, our website has been entirely in British English. This has caused some issues for American users in a couple of ways: 

• American users are used to a different date format: they use MM/DD/YYYY whereas in the UK we use DD/MM/YYYY. This causes confusion when dates are shown, as when we display a date like  01/02/2019 it’s unclear whether this is 1st February or 2nd January 
• It can appear like we have spelling mistakes to Americans, as we spell words like “organizer” (organiser) and “color” (colour) differently because of our use of the British spellings 

This update allows users to select a language from their profile page, currently either between British English and American English. The default language selected is based on the user’s browser settings or IP when they register. The platform also assumes a language based on browser settings or IP if users don’t have an account.  

Whichever language you select determines the language you’ll see, and this changes for each user. This means the date pickers show months and days differently, and any words that have different spellings between British and American English will be shown according to the language you choose. 

Updated Date Pickers 

The date pickers on our platform have proven to be tricky for a while – they weren’t user-friendly and can often be cumbersome and confusing to use. 

We’ve replaced these date pickers with new ones. The new date pickers have an intuitive interface that’s easy to use on both desktop and mobile devices, with a clear way to select the time and a range of dates, and none of the hassles the old date pickers brought! 

To make sure your event(s) and profile has the correct settings, we’ve made the following changes: 

• We’ve updated all existing event time zones using the event(s) address and updated all other dates and times in the event(s) to match this 
• We’ve updated your profile time zone, using data you may have already provided to us, such as your address 

As we’ve made these changes under the assumptions above, you should check the time zone set against your event(s), and the time zone set against your profile to make sure they’re all correct. This way, we can ensure your event and future events run as smoothly as possible. 

We hope you enjoy this update and hope it benefits your event. If you have any questions, please let us know by emailing support@helmtickets.com.