The Bar
VenueWiki news — what’s new in the manual and the calendar sync.
Ship notes, new connectors, new venues, and the occasional war story from the crew. Pull up a stool.
PDF onboarding into AV manual cards works now
If you tried uploading a venue doc in the last little while and got a page full of nothing — that was a real bug, not you.
The AI sorter was being cut off at 60 seconds while it read your document. Everything else in the pipeline reported success, so the page just landed empty with no explanation. Fixed, and given five times the headroom it needs.
While we were in there: if sorting ever does fail now, you'll see it say so instead of quietly showing you an empty page.
Upload a technical advance, a loading dock policy, a spec sheet. It reads the whole thing, breaks it into cards, and routes each one to the right room and category for you to check before anything goes live.
Rigging is now its own category
It sat between Stage and Comms because that's where it belongs — truss, points, motors and load ratings are their own discipline, not a footnote in staging.
Every room on VenueWiki has it already. Nothing to set up.
Multiple lifts and loading docks
This one's overdue.
Venues don't have a lift. ivy has two that go to completely different parts of the building. MCA has three. The Opera House has more than twelve and they're nothing like each other — a goods lift, a passenger lift and a scenery lift share a word and not much else.
Up until today VenueWiki could only hold one of each, which made the answer to "will my case fit in the lift" somewhere between useless and wrong.
Now you can add as many docks and lifts as the venue has, name them the way the venue names them, and record dimensions for each. Same for docks — plenty of venues have more than one, at different addresses, with different height limits.
Attach rigging plots, CAD drawings and spec sheets to cards
Cards can now carry files, not just photos.
Two ways to do it:
Upload it — PDFs and CAD files (.dwg, .dxf), up to 25 MB. PDFs open
straight in a new tab; CAD downloads.
Or just link it — paste a Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint or Sync link. We store the link, not the file. The venue keeps their rigging plot in their own storage, updates it when it changes, and the link on VenueWiki keeps pointing at the current version. Nobody has to remember to re-upload.
Fair warning on links: we can't control who can open a document sitting in someone else's cloud. The link's visibility is theirs, not ours, and we say so on the card.
One card in more than one category, from the start
The "also appears in" picker used to only exist when you submitted a suggestion by hand. It's now on onboarding cards too.
So when you're working through a document and a card about truss belongs in both Rigging and Stage, you tick it once during review rather than going back card-by-card afterwards.
Venue managers: your own documents go live immediately
If you're a venue manager or admin onboarding your venue's own document, your cards now publish when you approve them.
You were already able to approve each one individually straight after — this just removes the second lap. You read every card on the review screen; that's the review. Everyone else's submissions still go through the normal voting.
Nominating a venue manager works properly now
The nomination form was rejecting perfectly valid email addresses. Turned out the fields were in an order that made everyone type their details one row down, so the surname was being submitted as the email.
Email field's first now, first and last names are separate, and if it ever does reject something it'll show you what it read rather than just saying no.
You can nominate anyone — they don't need a VenueWiki account. They'll get an invite, and when they sign up the nomination is already waiting for them.
Smaller things you might notice
The onboarding page stops reloading on you. Switch to another tab to check a document, come back, and your place is kept. It was refreshing the whole page every time the browser regained focus.
Manual pages tell you what's going on. Instead of a blank space where a manual should be, you'll see whether it's being generated, whether it's waiting on the first contribution, or whether generation failed.
More room specs to fill in. Room width and depth, floor area, truss height (separate from ceiling height, because they're different numbers and riggers care about the second one), and entry door dimensions — because "will it fit through the door" is a real question with a real answer.
As always — if something's wrong on a page, flag it. That's what the button's for, and a venue page that nobody corrects isn't worth much.