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.

Schedule

How can I export my schedule to PDF / print my schedule?

pretalx does not currently offer a PDF export of the schedule, because of the level of complexity that comes with printing a schedule with an arbitrary amount of rooms. However, the schedule editor page has print support, hiding the usual pretalx UI elements like the menu sidebar. Combined with the schedule editor’s support for hiding rooms, this is the best PDF version of the schedule pretalx offers. To use it, navigate to your schedule editor, select your browser’s print dialogue, and then select “Print to PDF”.

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.

Integrations

How do we create speaker tickets with pretix?

As there is no direct integration between pretix and pretalx yet (some details here on GitHub), the best way to send pretix vouchers to all your pretalx speakers is to use the pretalx CSV export. Select all accepted and confirmed speakers, and export the name and email field. You can then use the bulk voucher form in pretix with the exported CSV file directly – you can find more information on the bulk voucher sending workflow in the pretix documentation.