🌟 End-to-end feedback and suggestions from setting up a self-hosted instance #1431

We’re setting up Hi.Events v2.0.0-rc.2 for a student association. While configuring it and trying it with a few people, we encountered some issues and things that weren’t immediately clear. I wanted to share them here to see if you agree with any of them.

Before we start, we’ve really enjoyed using the platform so far: it’s easy to set up, looks great, and has all the features we need without feeling overloaded, which is exactly what we were looking for. Very well done.

Issues experienced:

1. Invited users can get stuck trying to log in. A colleague received an invitation but went straight to the website instead of opening the email link. Login failed, so he followed the password-reset route. He successfully reset his password but still couldn’t log in because the invitation was pending. The error only mentioned his email/password. It would help to tell him to accept the invitation through his email, or offer a way to complete acceptance from there. It took us a bit to figure out what the issue was with him logging in.

2. Orders from deleted events remain visible but no longer open. We cancelled our test orders and deleted the old event, but its orders remain on the organizer dashboard. The statistics exclude that event, so we see zero orders in the totals with old orders listed underneath. Clicking one of those orders leads to a page that keeps loading.

Suggestions:

1. The buyer has to enter their name again for iDEAL. Their name was already collected earlier in checkout, but Stripe’s payment form asks for it again. The backend already sends it to the Stripe customer record; could it also prefill the payment form? At this step we would prefer minimal friction.
2. The platform-fee report is shown on self-hosted installations. This initially made us wonder whether Hi.Events was charging extra fees, even with SaaS mode disabled. Hiding it or explaining why it’s there would help.
3. Could the GMT label be optional? The date display itself is good, but “GMT+1” feels a bit technical for an event aimed at a local audience. When the event’s timezone is already correctly configured, we’d prefer to hide that label while keeping the times in the selected timezone.
4. There’s some unnecessary spacing above the payment button with iDEAL as the only payment option. Nothing major, but the form’s minimum height leaves a bit of extra whitespace when there are no card fields.
5. There’s no way to change a recurring event back to a single event. If someone selects recurring by mistake, there doesn’t seem to be a supported way back and you have to make a completely new event.

Very soon the instance will be used for a real event, so after that is finished we will come back with our experiences if you do not mind.