Issues with Facebook events and default Calendar app

[DAE51D]

Maybe I'm re-tarded, but I'm getting increasingly irritated with this Samsung Calendar app.

Trying to sync Facebook events/birthdays -- something that should be enabled by default isn't.

I followed this:
How do I sync my Calendar on my Samsung Galaxy S

 

[DAE51D]

Okay, more info on this. I downloaded "Business Calendar" to see if it worked any better, and much to my ultimate sadness, it appears the problem is more low-level than the actual app. This had the exact same events showing as the default calendar (and worse, no way to "hide declined events" that I can see).

So what the hell is going on? Why is my "sync" not syncing properly with Facebook? This is a brand new phone I got yesterday.

 

[DAE51D]

Even more frustrating news... I double checked with my HTC Evo 4G and while it displays all the events properly (only showing my events I'm going to) as God intended, the birthdays are not right either. Now I'm starting to think this is a Facebook API problem? I'll continue to investigate...

 

[DAE51D]

I'm starting to see what is going on here...

First issue is that you have to go to Facebook.com > Home > Events > (gear) > Settings > UNCHECK both the "hide" options ('suggested' and 'declined')

Then go through your calendar and start cleaning out the crap there by clicking the little X that appears to the right when you hover over the event. This purges it completely. "DECLINE" may as well, but I didn't experiment with that since why do I even want to see them if I'm not going. It's just cruft.

Note that it may take a few refreshes of the page to get rid of all the suggested ones as they seem to spawn like rabbits with different events. Gee thanks FB for being so "helpful". *sigh*

Then in the Calendar app, 'sync'. And it should look closer to what you expect.

I notice that it seems to SHOW events that you have NOT done anything with (and there's no way to turn that off unfortunately). Meaning, you were invited to but haven't chosen if you're going or not. Conversely, the interesting thing is that it does NOT show events you said "MAYBE" or "DECLINED". Personally I wish it would do the opposite of this. I'd rather not see clutter of events I don't care about. I have to manage them from FB anyways. I also wish it would show me the "MAYBE" events so that should my plans change on that day, I would be reminded of that alternate thing to do. Not very intuitive if you ask me.

BIRTHDAYS seem to be still broken and it appears it is a Facebook API problem even though I can't find any pages to support this theory. I THINK it has to do with birthdays that do NOT have a YEAR associated with them if you view "About" on a Contact (in facebook.com). These ones still don't show up sadly. Although, referencing my first post about my birthday, I can clearly see the year is set for one of my friends and yet she is still not showing up on our birthday date. This also means that there is no fix that I can suggest like the jenky events above (yet). I think there is some hacky trick where you could export birthdays to a FB URL that Google Calendar can stream, but then you would have duplicate birthdays for all the "working" ones.

I should mention again that this is a sync issue on both the stock calendar and also the "business calendar" app I downloaded, meaning it is a low-level sync issue at the core of the phone or FB API sync code, NOT an app/calendar issue. Although confusingly my 3 year old HTC Evo 4G DOES in fact show SOME of the birthdays that don't have years associated with them (and of course the same issue on my actual birthday date where people are missing that have both years and no years) -- soooooo I really don't know WTF is going on because it's not consistent?!

All I know is shit is broken and someone needs to fix it. This is stupid.

 

[fuzztalkradio]

Did you figure anything out I'm of course having the same issues

 

[DAE51D]

Did you figure anything out I'm of course having the same issues

Nope. I just sadly gave up and accept it as the shitty Facebook API and equally shitty Samsung GUI combined. It really sucks that these phone companies churn out phones every few weeks instead of having one major phone and focus on making it the best GUI possible. And FB is equally to blame. Some days their crap works and other days it doesn't. You would THINK that they'd actually care since a billion people rely upon it every day.

 

[DAE51D]

I can definitely confirm that android is not showing birthdays that don't have a year component. I have added the FB birthday feed to my Microsoft Outlook on my PC and ALL birthdays show up. How is this MASSIVE bug still not fixed yet?

And why in the flying F do I still have to manually filter out events on FB because by DEFAULT the android shows ALL events that I have not specifically declined! That is the most stupid thing I've ever heard of. My calendar is filled with all kinds of crap I never asked to be part of but people have sent me invites too (clubs/movies/events, even in other cities!) It should ONLY show me things I specifically said "JOIN" to! UGH!!!! So infuriating!

 

[matzshorts]

Hey so I am having the same sort of problem. I can;t seem to get Facebook calendar to show up as an option in either s calendar or Google calendar.

Also when I go to Settings>Accounts>Facebook the only option that shows up is sync contacts and no sync calendar.

What did you mean by the "apps for facebook" account?

Cheers,

Mat