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.
Spec extraction from venue PDFs works now
Tuesday we said the system half-read spec numbers out of your documents, which was another way of saying it didn't. It does now.
Upload a loading dock policy or a technical advance and, alongside the cards, VenueWiki reads the numbers — dock heights, lift dimensions, room sizes, door widths — and offers each one for review with the exact line from the PDF next to it, so you can see where every number came from before you accept it.
It knows the difference between a lift door and the door into the room, because we taught it the hard way. A venue with two lifts gets two lifts, each with its own dimensions and the list of rooms it serves, pulled straight from the document.
Accept a whole group in one click. The page doesn't reload when you do — that was ours, and it's fixed.
Every field, not just the empty ones
The reader used to only offer numbers for fields that were blank. Now it reads everything and, when the document disagrees with what's already on the page, shows you both: the current value, the document's value, and the line it came from. Venue managers decide which wins. The old value is kept on record either way.
So when the venue's own paperwork says the dock is 3.2 m and the page says 3.4, that stops being something nobody notices.
Loading docks and lifts look like specs again
Tuesday's multiple-lifts feature shipped with the dimensions squashed into one line, which meant you couldn't flag a single number as wrong. Undone. Every dock and lift now shows the same rows as every other spec — value, verified badge, flag button, "Unknown" where nobody's filled it in yet — and venue managers get an Add lift / Add dock button right there on the page.
AV manuals: generated once, nothing dropped
The category manuals had two quiet problems. They'd regenerate when nothing had changed — burning time and looking twitchy — and occasionally a contributed fact would just not make it into the written manual, with nothing to tell you it was gone.
Both fixed, and the second one comes with a rule we'll keep: nothing you contribute gets silently dropped. If the writer can't work a fact into a section, it lands under "Additional notes" at the bottom, cited like everything else, until a better home exists.
Unverified contributions now show for everyone the card's visibility allows — marked amber until they're approved, so you know exactly which lines the crowd has vetted and which are fresh.
And the "generating" banner only shows when a manual is actually being written, which sounds obvious and briefly wasn't.
Venue-wide cards reach their section pages
An awkward one to write: venue-wide cards approved through onboarding have never shown up on their section pages. Not a new bug — it's been there since venue sections existed — but Tuesday was the first time anyone onboarded a big venue-wide document and went looking. Fixed, and every venue-wide card ever affected has been repaired in place.
"Also appears in" now works on venue-wide cards everywhere it works on room cards — onboarding, suggestions, and editing after the fact.
Smaller things you might notice
Bullet lists in manuals render as lists instead of a paragraph with dashes in it.
Approving a suggestion updates the manual straight away. There used to be a one-minute cooldown that made fresh approvals look ignored.
If a document mentions the same fact twice — because it was onboarded twice, say — the manual cites one and notes the duplicate instead of writing it up twice. Proper de-duplication of repeated cards is on the list.