Aggregator Issues

[Neil Duckett]

After a week of using the Aggregator (4.3.1.1 or 4.3.1), the issues i’m still experiencing and would like an update on are;

Duplicate events, is that resolved? I’ve deleted all that were created, but found leaving them in the “Ignored” has stopped / slowed them being recreated. Those duplicates we also created with a blank user which made it a bit easier to spot.

Facebook events created not having a Google map associated with it and in many cases no featured image?

Facebook events not creating an Organiser like the previous import tool did, despite importing events from new organisers?

I need the ability to merge duplicate venue’s so the events appear under the one correct venue. Multiple people use the same venue yet the name can vary slightly the Aggregator is creating multiple venues – how can this be done?

Aggregator is working roughly 30% of the time, the history shows “Failed for an unknown reason” on many instances, and of course throws up a heap of error comments? In the help is says I’ve only used 5 of 100 imports.

When successful, it’s telling me X new events and X in total, but there’s no way of seeing a report on those X new events that were imported in that run, or is there?

What was a fantastic tool that bought in tidy looking and compete events in a controlled manner is now not delivering at all, i hope this is rectified soon.

[Nico]

Hey Neil,

Thanks for getting in touch with us and sorry to hear about these initial issues you are having 🙁 I can assure you we are working to make thing right again 🙂

Let me take a look to the backlog and find each of the issues…

Duplicate events, is that resolved? I’ve deleted all that were created, but found leaving them in the “Ignored” has stopped / slowed them being recreated. Those duplicates we also created with a blank user which made it a bit easier to spot.

Duplicates for legacy importer user were fixed in hotfix release 4.3.0.1 released a couple of days after the 4.3 release, so that should be fixed. Please note that if you delete all events, re-importing will re-create them, while leaving them as “ignored” will prevent them from being re-imported.

Facebook events created not having a Google map associated with it and in many cases no featured image?

There’s a related bug to the Show Google Map setting not being respected. Maybe this is what you are referring to? I don’t see any problems reported regarding featured image of imported events.

Facebook events not creating an Organiser like the previous import tool did, despite importing events from new organisers?

I could find this one logged, and stated to be released in 4.3.2 coming out next week. This might change due to time contains but due to the gravity of the issue I guess we will try to fit this in even if that delays the launch of the release.

I need the ability to merge duplicate venue’s so the events appear under the one correct venue. Multiple people use the same venue yet the name can vary slightly the Aggregator is creating multiple venues – how can this be done?

I guess this is not feature of the plugin, I mean if the venues have different names they won’t be recognized as the same one. Maybe I can help you create a custom snippet to merge these, but crafting the customization for you might be out of the scope of our support service. Can you describe what would work for you? How events should be recognized, etc?

Aggregator is working roughly 30% of the time, the history shows “Failed for an unknown reason” on many instances, and of course throws up a heap of error comments? In the help is says I’ve only used 5 of 100 imports.

We discovered and fixed a bug where on-demand imports were run by cron, resulting in a lot more imports than it should. This might be the cause of the issue. The logging has been imporved as well and we are looking to tweak it a bit more too.

When successful, it’s telling me X new events and X in total, but there’s no way of seeing a report on those X new events that were imported in that run, or is there?

No there is no way of seeing these imported events. A workaround I personally use is to set the new imported events as drafts and manually publishing them after a review. Setting a particular category for those events would work as well.

Once again I’m sorry for the hassle on the transition we are doing our best to get things working as they did (plus the improvements Aggregator adds).

Please let me know about the ‘merge’ snippet so I can give that a try,
Best,
Nico

[Neil Duckett]

Thanks Nico, i appreciate the detailed response.

With regards to the snippet, it’s only 1 instance at the moment where the one venue has been described marginally different on 3 occasions;

The Midnight Shift, The Shift Club, Midnight Shift.

I suspect due to different organisers creating FB events within the business but another use case down the track could be independent businesses that use a common venue. Once this venue is set up in the system with full contact details it would be nice to merge any rogue venues with the desired one.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Neil

[Nico]

Thanks for the follow-up Neil!

Regarding the different venue names, I thought we could detect they were the same venues in some way (they had almost the same name for example). Given the scenario I’d say a manual merge is the way to go (maybe this plugin can help). I understand the need but I’m not sure how a script/snippet can help here. Maybe it’s a script were you manually input the “correct” venue ID, and the IDs from the duplicated venues you want to merge? The script would change the venue to the events and then delete the duplicates, Does this sounds like something that would help?

Best,
Nico

[Neil Duckett]

Thanks Nico, i’ll have a look into the suggested plugin.

Your suggested solution sounds like a valid one – input the venue ID to keep then the ID of the ‘to be merged’ venues and their events. I think that would work!

[Nico]

Perfect Neil!

Give me some time to get that script done (hopefully I can get that tomorrow) and I’ll send it your way 🙂

Best,
Nico

[Nico]

Hey Neil, sorry for the delay here! I just wanted to let you know this has been out of my radar for a few days 🙁

Thanks for the patience will be in touch shortly,
Best,
Nico

[Nico]

Hi there Neil,

Thanks for the patience while I worked on this one 🙂 Just wanted to make sure the code makes sense as it will change data in your site.


/* Tribe, merge venues util function */
function merge_venues ( $venue_id, $merge_venues ) {

// let's check the venues_id is valid
if ( !tribe_is_venue( $venue_id ) ) return;

foreach ( $merge_venues as $merge_venue ) {

if ( !tribe_is_venue( $merge_venue ) ) continue;

// replace merge_venue for new venue in all events
$events = tribe_get_events ( array('venue' => $merge_venue) );

foreach ( $events as $event ) {

$data = array();
$data['venue']['VenueID'] = $venue_id;

if ( get_post_meta( $event->ID, '_EventShowMap', true ) ) $data['venue']['EventShowMap'] = 1;
if ( get_post_meta( $event->ID, '_EventShowMapLink', true ) ) $data['venue']['EventShowMapLink'] = 1;

Tribe__Events__API::saveEventMeta( $event->ID, $data );
}

// delete merge_venue
Tribe__Events__API::deleteVenue( $merge_venue );
}

}
/*
* IMPORTANT: venues will be deleted from your site!!!
* Uncomment the code below, input the correct venue IDs and reload a site page for it to run once, then comment it back again.
* The first parameter is the correct venue ID
* The second parameter is an array that holds venues ID to merged and deleted
*/

//add_action ( 'init', function () { merge_venues ( 99, array ( 33, 34, etc ) ); } );


Paste this code in your theme’s (or child theme’s) functions.php file and follow the instructions to use it. Please note this function will DELETE venues from your site! So please make sure to test it out in a staging site first to be sure it’s working as intended, or comment this part of the code Tribe__Events__API::deleteVenue( $merge_venue ); to prevent venues from being deleted and do that yourself manually. Also please note that while I tested the function and could see it’s working as expected, it’s not a fully tested and reviewed code. This is provided as a starting point for your customization and you should make sure it’s working as expected for you.

Please let me know if it helps,
Best,
Nico

[Neil Duckett]

Thanks very much, Nico. I’ll look at getting this implemented directly. Cheers!

[Nico]

Thanks for the follow-up Neil! Please make sure to proceed with caution because as the note states this will delete data from the site.

Setting the thread back to ‘Pending Fix’ until the main issue here is solved (Facebook events are imported with organizer as blank).

Best,
Nico

[George]

Hello!

I wanted to share the news that a fix has finally arrived for these issues—organizers should now be imported without issues.

Grab the 4.3.4 update from today to get this bug fix. Learn more about the 4.3.4 release here.

Cheers!
George

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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