Site Update: Two More UNDERTALE Sittings, and Our English Pages Still Speak Chinese

We re-check ticketing information every day. This is the 13 August pass, including the mistakes that were ours.

Two matinees added to UNDERTALE

A 14:30 performance has been added on both 2 and 3 October, on sale from 18:00 on 13 August at the same prices as the evenings. The municipal culture bureau's permit had licensed two slots on each day all along; only the 19:30 pair was on public sale before, and all four are now bookable.

We missed the venue's own box office

The Shanghai Conservatory Opera House has been selling this concert through its own site since the first wave on 7 August. Our 7 August pass recorded only the resale platform Damai. Damai's Shanghai allocation was 300 tickets, against a hall of roughly 1,200 over two nights, so it was never the whole picture. For six days the only buy button on our page pointed at the channel with the least stock. The official channel is now listed alongside it.

160 events show Chinese text on their English pages

This one is larger. Our ticket-note field has a Chinese column and no English one, and the page prints it in both languages. English readers see a paragraph of Chinese in the middle of the ticket panel, for example the notice that an event is listed from a government permit and the presenter has not announced ticketing.

160 published events are affected, more than half the catalogue. Bilingual from day one is a rule of this site and this is the largest breach of it. The fix is not big, because those 160 rows contain only eight distinct strings and six of them cover 152 rows. It needs a database column and a deploy, and it is next in the queue.

Two smaller things

The UNDERTALE ticket note was still carrying a snapshot of Damai's remaining stock taken on the evening of 7 August, reporting three price tiers as gone. Numbers like that change within minutes and we left it up for six days. It now carries information that does not expire, namely prices, purchase limits, the refund policy and which channels exist. Observations of that kind go into our verification log from now on, not onto the page.

For the eighth instalment of The Chinese Beethoven, Chen Pi-hsien on 17 September 2027, we queried the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra's ticketing API. The concert is not among its 557 records, whose forward window ends on 25 June 2027. The government permit therefore remains the only source, and neither programme nor ticketing exists yet. We have added the soloist and a description; the programme section stays empty.

The update record was not saying anything

None of the changes above were visible in the 「Changes to this page」 panel on the event page. UNDERTALE gained two performances and an official ticketing channel, and the panel said one line: prices and on-sale details checked.

The filter behind that panel recognised six fields — prices, availability, booking link, ticket note, time, date. Adding a performance and adding a ticketing channel are new records with no field name attached, so both were discarded entirely. So were on-sale time, running time and purchase limits. The only thing left to print was the least useful write of the day.

Fixed. Added performances, new ways to buy, on-sale time changes and changes to running time or admission rules are each listed now, ordered by what matters rather than by the order we happened to write them. That event shows five lines where it showed one.

And a date was wrong

Found while fixing the above. The "last checked" date at the foot of every event page was a day early. Our ingest scripts stamp their timestamps at midnight Shanghai time, and the page was slicing a calendar day out of that instant in UTC, so 13 August at 00:00 became 12 August. Every event touched by a normal ingest was under-reporting its own freshness, which is the one thing that field exists to report. It now converts to Shanghai time.

See the on-sale calendar on Shanghai Concerts