Getting help

Runner, for a show that is happening right now

In live production, a runner is who you send when there is no time to fix the real problem. They fetch what you need, patch the hole, and keep the show moving. That is what this is.

Put RUNNER at the front of your subject line and write to support@planetevents.io. That is the whole mechanism, and it works from a phone with no browser open and nothing else loaded. There is a one-tap button for it on planetevents.io/contact that fills in the subject and the blanks for you.

Five things make it actionable. The event and the venue. Where you are in the show, meaning what has just happened and what is next. What you were doing and what happened instead. Whether you already have your crew PDF, because that tells us whether your show is already safe. And a phone number if you would rather be called than typed at. We publish no number of our own, and if yours is in the message we will use it when a call is faster than typing.

Use it when the show is running. Anything that can wait until after doors is an ordinary message, and keeping it ordinary is what keeps the word meaning something. Nobody is ever told off for using it, so if you are not sure, use it.

What Runner promises

Three things, and they are short on purpose so you can hold them in your head while something is going wrong.

A Runner is read before everything else in the inbox. Nothing outranks it.

What comes back is a person, and the first thing it goes after is keeping your show running. A way around the problem, a repair we make by hand on your data, a corrected file sent from our side. Fixing the software comes later, and sometimes it is not what was wrong in the first place.

Every Runner gets answered, including the ones we reach after your show has ended.

What Runner does not promise

That somebody is awake. There is no night shift here and no on-call rota. Guillermo runs live events himself, which means the hours you most need us are sometimes the hours he is standing on a floor with a headset on.

We would rather write that down than let you find it out at 7pm on a Saturday. It is also why the first thing on the show-day path is getting your PDFs out, not writing to us.

Runner is not a paid lane. Everyone in the beta has it, and there is no support tier to buy here.

Tell us before the day

Send us your show date, the venue, and the hours you will be live. In production the call where everything gets confirmed beforehand is the advance, and this is ours.

Send it as early as you can and we answer it before your date, with one of two answers. We will be near a phone, or we will not, because we are working a show of our own. Both are worth having while you can still plan around them, and the second one is the reason it is worth asking for.

Left to the morning of your show, it is the wrong question to be asking us. Send a Runner instead when something actually goes wrong.

The page writes the email for you

It asks two questions that decide where your message lands. What this is about, and how close your event is. Then your name, your organization, and the message.

It has no send button of its own. It builds the email and hands it to your own mail app, so you read every line before it leaves, you keep your own copy, and there is no form queue in the middle that can swallow it. If your machine has no mail app, the same message copies to your clipboard in one click and the address is on screen as plain text.

When our email system is wired up this becomes a real form, and we will say so on the page rather than quietly changing it.

Doors open inside 48 hours

If your event is close but not running yet, say so on the form. It tags the subject line SHOW DAY and your message sorts above the ordinary queue. If the show starts and something is still wrong, use RUNNER instead.

Before you write, take ninety seconds and export your two PDFs. See “Before doors open.” It resolves a real share of show-day emergencies before anyone has read your message.

Why there are no response times on this page

We have not run enough shows to know our own numbers honestly, and a number we miss on your worst day is worse than no number at all. So we publish the order we work in and who is on the other end, and we do not publish a clock.

What we can tell you: every message is read by a person, the queue is sorted by whose show is closest, and a Runner is read before all of it. Telling us when your event is does more than anything else you can write.

Chasing us is allowed. If something you sent has gone quiet and you still need it, send it again and it will not annoy anyone.

If nobody answers

This is planned for rather than apologized for, because it will happen.

Get your crew PDF out of the app first. It is in the Run of Show toolbar and it downloads on the click, and every seat on the event can pull it including view-only crew. Once it is on a phone or on paper it needs no wifi and no login, and your show stops depending on us, on the venue’s internet, and on how fast anyone reads an inbox.

planetevents.io/status tells you whether the problem is ours. It refreshes every thirty seconds and it does not ask you to sign in.

Your message is not lost while you wait. It is sitting in the inbox and it gets answered.

What to put in the message

The event name and the event date. What you expected to happen. What happened instead. A screenshot if you have one, attached in your mail app before you send, which helps more than a paragraph.

If it concerns a specific workspace, put its name in the Organization field so we can find it without a round trip.

What we do not offer

No live chat and no phone line. The hour a phone number would matter most is the hour nobody could answer it, and a chat widget with nobody behind it promises seconds and delivers nothing. Email is the channel, and it is watched.

There is also no support tier to buy. Everyone in the beta sits in one queue, sorted by whose show is closest.

Three pages that answer it faster than we can

planetevents.io/status for whether it is just you. planetevents.io/help for how something works, which is this Help Center and it has a search field at the top. planetevents.io/roadmap for what is live, what we are building, which bugs beta users have reported that we have not fixed yet, and the date we open to everyone.