FAQ

This document collects issues that came up in the past, and that cannot be solved in pretalx with a reasonable amount of effort or time.

Sessions

What is the difference between tracks and session types?

Tracks are a way to group sessions by topic, and will be shown in the schedule as colour-coded blocks. Session types are a way to determine the format and default duration of a session. See more in the Session user guide.

What is the difference between the “accepted” and “confirmed” session status?

The “accepted” status is used to indicate that a session has been accepted by the program committee. The “confirmed” status is used to indicate that the speaker has confirmed their participation in the conference. The “confirmed” status is set by the speaker, though organisers can also set it manually. See more in the Session user guide.

How do I designate sessions as fallback/alternates?

To designate sessions as fallback or alternates, you can use the pending states feature. To do so, leave the session in the “submitted” state, but set it to “pending accepted”. Pending states are not shown to speakers, but you can write an email to all speakers with proposals marked as “pending accepted” if you want to communicate this decision. For more details on how to manage session states, see the Session Lifecycle section in the Sessions & Proposals guide.

Email

We run into issues when using Gmail.

In Google’s eyes, pretalx is a less secure app, which you’ll have to grant special access. Even then, Gmail is known to unexpectedly block your SMTP connection with unhelpful error messages if you use it to send out too many emails in bulk (e.g. all rejections for a conference) even on GSuite, so using Gmail for transactional email is a bad idea.