Recurrence and event dates
What this covers
How a repeating event turns into real dates, and why that matters. Needs the manage-events permission.
Setting it up
Turn Recurring on and choose:
- Days of week — Mon to Sun, as many as you like.
- Start date and End date — the span it runs across.
Tabledoo summarises it back to you in plain language, such as "Every Tue & Thu, 1 Oct – 31 Dec", so you can check you got it right before publishing.
The recurrence becomes real dates
This is the part worth understanding. The pattern is not consulted every time somebody looks at the page. Publishing turns it into one real date at a time, each with its own capacity, its own bookings and its own status.
Each date also stores which tables it uses, as they were when it was created. That is deliberate: rearranging your floor plan in November does not silently reshape a date in December that people have already booked.
Dates appear about four months ahead
Tabledoo keeps roughly a 16-week rolling window of dates and extends it automatically each week. A weekly quiz set to run all year does not create 52 dates on day one — it keeps the next few months live and adds more as time passes.
Your public events page tells guests the same thing: "More dates are released weekly."
So if a guest asks about a date next summer and cannot see it, nothing is wrong — it has not been released yet.
Dates created later handle seated clashes on their own — communal clashes wait for you
When you publish, you decide what happens to any existing booking that clashes. Dates released weeks later have nobody watching, so Tabledoo only resolves the clashes it safely can without asking: a seated clash is included automatically, since nothing changes for that guest. A communal clash is left exactly where the publish-time gate would leave it — the date stays off-live, unresolved, until a host opens it and decides.
What "including" means differs by seating mode, and a communal Include now emails the guest automatically too — see Publishing and resolving conflicts.
The practical consequence: a guest who books an ordinary table for a Friday months from now, on a seated event, can find themselves part of your Friday event when that date is released — harmlessly, since nothing about their evening changes. On a communal event that same booking instead leaves the date waiting for you, so check the event page occasionally for dates showing Conflicts rather than assuming a newly released date is ready to go.
Editing a recurring event after publishing
Future dates are rebuilt with the new details — the tables, the capacity and the window are refreshed and clashes re-checked. Two safeguards:
- Existing bookings are never silently dropped.
- A date that now clashes goes back off-live until you resolve it, rather than quietly going ahead.
So editing is safe, but check the event page afterwards for dates needing attention.
Managing a single date
The event page lists every date with its status — Ready, Conflicts or Cancelled — plus its bookings. You can cancel one date without touching the rest: see Cancelling an event or one date.