Why is my events list full of the same meeting?

You add a weekly prayer meeting as a recurring event, and suddenly your homepage shows five prayer meetings and nothing else. It looks like a fault, but it is doing exactly what it was asked to do: an events list shows the next few events by date, and if the next five events are all the same meeting, that is what you get. Worse, it makes it look as though nothing else is happening.

Ways round it

1. Point the list at a different group. This is the tidiest answer. Put your regular weekly meetings in one group and your one-off events in another, then point the homepage list at the group with the one-off events. See showing events on a page of your website.
2. Show more events. If the list can show ten rather than four, the weekly meetings stop crowding everything else out, though they still take up room.
3. Create fewer occurrences at a time. A series set up a term ahead rather than a year ahead keeps the list shorter, and you can extend the series when you need to.
4. Use featured events in the app. Marking events as featured changes what the app shows, so your one-off events can lead there even if the website list is busy. See featuring events in your church app.
5. Give regular meetings their own page. A ‘Regular weekly meetings’ page listing what happens every week often communicates better than repeating the same entry in a calendar, and it frees the calendar for things that change.

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Good to know

• There is not a setting that shows only the next occurrence of a repeating series in a list. If none of the options above works for your site, get in touch and we will talk through what is possible.
• Splitting your events into groups helps in other ways too: you can colour-code them, and set who can see them, group by group.
• Before you rearrange anything, look at the page logged out and on a phone. Lists often show fewer events on a small screen, which is where the problem is most obvious.
• Deleting occurrences one at a time to thin out a series is not worth it. Shortening the series is quicker and easier to undo.