- This topic has 3 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 9 years, 9 months ago by
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On Sunday the person who does the calendar entries tried to uncheck Saturday on a recurring event that was not supposed to be on a Saturday. Sometime after that, that event multiplied until every Saturday for 2 years had between 50 and 150 of that event and most weekdays too. Interestingly the weekday ones show up on the back end but NOT on the calendar itself.
We think that at the same time another event that had not been edited or touched in any way, multiplied too. In all there were about 15000 duplicate recurring events, and I think the only thing that stopped the process is that the VPS server restarted from the CPU load.
In the meantime, I’ve (I’m the webmaster, not the owner) been deleting all these duplicates as fast as I can but even using Bulk Delete and increasing both the php memory and the wordpress memory I can only go 130 at a time and that takes about 5 minutes. There are still about 5000 of one event and 1000 of the other left to go (yes, I’ve deleted 9000+ by hand). I’ve contacted the Bulk Delete plugin developer and he is trying to help too, but this is VERY bad timing as we’re heading into our busy season (of course – Murphy’s law) and one of those recurring nightmares, the one with 5000 remaining is on Saturday, our busiest day, and obscuring all the legit events happening on Saturdays for the rest of the summer.
- I’ve tried resetting the period that the recurring events go forward to only one year, and I read in one of the forum messages about runaway recurring events that that was subject to a cron job, but it’s been 24 hours and there’s been no change other than the ones I’ve deleted.
- I tried the cleanup plugin that was mentioned in one post but that crashed the site and I had to restart the server again. That was with all plugins disabled except the 2 calendar plugins.
- I looked at the MySQL query listed in one post and read the article but that’s based on category and really I need to delete them based on title and I’m not that comfortable with my MySQL skills.
- I’ve talked to the Host who looked at the server and the server history and didn’t see anything untoward, except that the CPU load spiked and the server restarted.
And most importantly – WHY? What kind of incense do I have to burn to have this NEVER happen again?
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This topic was modified 9 years, 10 months ago by
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This topic was modified 9 years, 10 months ago by
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Good afternoon Margie and welcome to the Events Calendar Support forum!
Thank you for reaching out to us.
We are sorry to hear about the recurring events being seemingly out of control. This is certainly not intended on our part.
I would love to help you with this topic.Before we begin, I am noticing that several plugins on your site are not up to date, including ours.
Of course, I would recommend backing up plugins and Database before attempting anything, but you might want to try updating to the latest versions (at least for our plugins – which include many bugfixes and new features). Even better if you could test these updates in a staging / test environment first.
Furthermore, it is usually not advised to run 2 separate security plugins on a website. I recommend choosing between iThemes Security and Wordfence to prevent odd behaviours on your site.
As for the main issue at stake here, you are right. We need to stop the bleeding as fast as possible.
Your efforts here have been exemplary so far.My first recommendation would be to take screenshots of the settings of this faulty recurring event (I would like to get these screenshots to help and investigate this) and then procede to delete the event altogether.
This should stop the recurrence from being out of control and should allow you to:
- Delete all instances of that event
- Re-create the event from scratch
As an alternative, if you have daily backups and there is no loss of data, you might have reverted back to the state of things prior to the person’s changes on Sunday.
Finally, could you tell me what your setting for timezones is in Events -> Settings -> General ?
And most importantly – WHY? What kind of incense do I have to burn to have this NEVER happen again ?
I am not sure exactly what happened on your specific install (server glitch, plugin or theme conflict, removal of the recurring event end date prior to deletion, template customization, etc..), but I want to truly apologize for all the inconvenience. Please know that it is pretty rare that something like this happens.
So in short, I totally understand how frustrating this can be, especially provided the timing.
But rest assured this is not license related and looks like the result of a particularly unlucky combination of events.On our end, our first goal is to help you fix the problem short term (regardless of the cause of the issue).
As a second step, we would like to try to investigate and reproduce the problem and do our due diligence on this.
This is where a screenshot of your settings as well as a copy of your WordPress theme (in a .zip link) would help us.Hang in there while we work on fixing this!
Best regards,
Geoff B.
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