Can we get some expedited support?

[Joseph]

It is clear that there are a lot of issues with the Event Aggregator by the number of threads started and being responded to by your paying customers. Can you please expedite your responses and support for these issues? We are going hours between responses for production sites with paying customers and clearly some very serious issues with your plugin.

[Joseph]

586 new comments related to event aggregator in my wordpress comments since my last request for support: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/why-are-the-logs-in-the-wordpress-comments/

core:aggregator:daily-limit-reached
The daily limit of 100 import requests to the Event Aggregator service has been reached. Please try again later.

Again, it is set to “on demand”, please expedite support.

[Joseph]

We really need some resolutions here, we are suffering from THOUSANDS of comments in our databases, thousands of entries in POSTMETA and thousands of posts titled: Record: schedule facebook on_demand. This plugin is destroying our sites.

[Joseph]

Refund request submitted, this is insane that you cannot remedy this or even respond.

[Rob]

Hi Joseph! Rob from Modern Tribe here…the team brought this thread to my attention a few minutes ago, and I wanted to step in to make sure you felt your concerns were being addressed and to make sure everyone is on the same page moving forward.

We take these types of reports seriously, and I should state up front that what you have reported — regarding Event Aggregator’s behaviors once it has crossed the import limit threshold — is a legitimate bug. Now that it is on our radar we are working hard to get a patch coded/tested/deployed in as timely a fashion as possible. I know our QA team and Director of Product are working on it as I type.

While I can understand your frustration, and you have my word that it is a priority for us, I do want to reset expectations regarding our support infrastructure. We try to be very transparent in our Forum Guidelines about the turnaround times folks can expect from us. I can appreciate that in situations like yours, this could feel like a long time between replies. But our support system works the way it does so we can ensure every customer thread gets an equal amount of attention, without having to pay a lot of money for access to support. (If we were to explore offerings like round-the-clock support or live chat or anything similar that guaranteed a quicker response time, the reality is that we would have to be charging a lot more for our licenses than we are right now.)

I say this because I’m admittedly a tad concerned that the team is spending more time than is perhaps appropriate triaging these replies — in this thread and others where you have posted, as well on our Facebook page — in a way that keeps us from supporting others. We want to help everyone…but the reality is that our resources are limited, and we need to prioritize requests in the order in which they were received.

At this point, my advice would be to deactivate Event Aggregator until a patch has been deployed addressing this issue — that should be happening very soon. While we cannot provide a refund for the Event Aggregator tool (my understanding from talking with the team is that we actually provided you with that license for free), I’d love to see if our fix for this bug solves your problems and spares you the need to take your business elsewhere.

If you’re open to this — to dialing back the frequency of follow-ups, and to have faith that I’ll be in touch as soon as we have a proposed solution in place — we would love the chance to regain your trust.

[Joseph]

I have not received anything for free, I paid for the Facebook Importer which has been replaced by the event aggregator, which clearly does not function. Things wouldn’t have gone from urgent to nuclear had someone simply responded to these threads. While you may feel that your support structure is sound, when you introduce a plugin that literally takes someone’s business down, it is nuclear for us waiting around for hours and hours for a reply that someone has at least READ the threads.

It is clear that this plugin was not tested thoroughly prior to its release and we, as paying customers, should not have to beta test this release with our businesses.

Here is a summary of some of the issues that are going on that makes this urgent.
1. When the aggregator fails, it creates a comment stating as such. Overnight, this resulted in more than 10,000 comments being added to my system.
2. When the aggregator fails, it creates a post for each failure leading to more than 10,000 posts being created in my system
3. When the aggregator fails, it creates post metadata for each post that was created above, resulting in more than 30,000 entries in the database.
4. All of these together caused our web hosting server to kill SQL for excessive usage resulting in our business website being down.
5. The aggregator simply ignores the update interval set in the system and runs every 15 minutes causing a large number of outbound and inbound requests. This lead to our firewall acting as if there was an intrusion, creating logs on its own that inundated the system.
6. Even with the license removed from Events Calendar, the aggregator would attempt to pull from facebook. There is no way to disable the aggregator to my knowledge, it is a part of the events calendar plugin.

There is no way to win my trust back. This is too severe. This plugin literally affected my livelyhood and my wallet and I have begun shopping for a replacement.

[Rob]

Hi Joseph,

Thanks so much for taking the time to review/follow-up on my reply. I really appreciate it.

It is truly disappointing to hear that you don’t believe we can win back your trust. Though we are obviously going to continue to address issues as they are reported — starting first and foremost with the import limit threshold problem that sparked this conversation in the first place — I can understand (albeit with a heavy heart!) if you won’t be using the products anymore.

I would caution, however, against making assumptions or blanket accusations. The claim that the plugin was not tested thoroughly prior to release is simply not true; our QA team spent a heck of a lot of time testing this plugin out over the past few weeks, and we only decided to ship it once we were confident that we had tested thoroughly. We clearly missed a use case here for importing very large numbers of events, for which we are accepting full responsibility and are working as fast as possible to get addressed. It is an unfortunate reality of software development that no product, especially when it first launches, is going to be 100% bug free. It is sadly impossible for us to test every configuration out there prior to release…if we did, we’d never end up shipping anything 🙂

We generally caution that folks who are upgrading plugins or installing new ones should always follow development best practices and deploy code to a staging/test environment before pushing to production. Out of curiosity, could we have done a better job of making that clear to you up front? Sometimes we assume that users are going to follow a certain approach…and if we can spare others your confusion down the road with some improved messaging (even something as simple as a “reminder: always test on staging first” message baked into the plugin), I’d love to hear it.

It sounds like you have decided to move onto another solution. If you would like recommendations, please let me know. Otherwise I can have the team initiate a refund for any purchase made in the last 30 days. (Anything outside of that window, as per our publicly stated refund policy, cannot be processed.) I know you have submitted an email on this and I will tell the team to process any refunds that fall within this 30 day window now.

If you decide to change your mind and re-purchase a plugin license, please know that I am here for you and will happily reinstate your active license / bring you back “into the fold”, should you decide to give us another shot.

[Joseph]

It is truly disappointing to hear that you don’t believe we can win back your trust. Though we are obviously going to continue to address issues as they are reported — starting first and foremost with the import limit threshold problem that sparked this conversation in the first place — I can understand (albeit with a heavy heart!) if you won’t be using the products anymore.

This definitely started the conversations, but it spiraled out of control as the aggregator lived on and the discoveries of how it worked / didn’t work came to light.

I would caution, however, against making assumptions or blanket accusations. The claim that the plugin was not tested thoroughly prior to release is simply not true; our QA team spent a heck of a lot of time testing this plugin out over the past few weeks, and we only decided to ship it once we were confident that we had tested thoroughly. We clearly missed a use case here for importing very large numbers of events, for which we are accepting full responsibility and are working as fast as possible to get addressed. It is an unfortunate reality of software development that no product, especially when it first launches, is going to be 100% bug free. It is sadly impossible for us to test every configuration out there prior to release…if we did, we’d never end up shipping anything ?

I do not have an extraordinarily large number of imports. I import events from 13 facebook pages right now with close to 380ish events in total. It is not a matter of testing every configuration, but testing basic functionality like actually considering the “on demand” setting in the first place. The plugin completely ignores this setting and attempts to import every 15 minutes. In my opinion, that is basic functionality and has nothing to do with environments.

Additionally, failures should not be stored as posts and using the comment system as a log is a bad idea as well. I highly recommend you reconsider those.

It sounds like you have decided to move onto another solution. If you would like recommendations, please let me know. Otherwise I can have the team initiate a refund for any purchase made in the last 30 days. (Anything outside of that window, as per our publicly stated refund policy, cannot be processed.) I know you have submitted an email on this and I will tell the team to process any refunds that fall within this 30 day window now.

I am looking at EventOn.
To be honest, all of this would have been avoided if someone took the time to respond to the threads stating that they are working on it and gave us a method to remove all the database entries that had been created that crippled our sites (giving us a snippet to remove the comments, posts, and postmeta says volumes, but it didn’t happen). Simply taking the time to let us know that you heard us… you have been very responsive now, but had that been done earlier… things would have been different for many of us here that are suffering through this. Again, the only way to disable the aggregator, to my knowledge, is to disable eventscalendar. Removing the licensing didn’t work.

[Rob]

This is solid feedback, Joseph. Though we try to hit all replies as quickly as possible, working through them in the order in which they were received, it sounds like we didn’t move quick enough for you to feel comfortable. Know that we are always working to improve our internal processes and that this thread has got us chatting about ways we could improve our overall support infrastructure.

Per our exchange last night, I had the team initiate a refund for you. You should see that post to your account sometime over the next 3-5 business days; if you don’t, please let me know so I can follow-up as needed.

I see you mention that: “the only way to disable the aggregator, to my knowledge, is to disable eventscalendar. Removing the licensing didn’t work.” Are you suggesting that even when disabling the Event Aggregator license, you’re finding that the crons are still running behind the scenes? Deactivating EA’s license should allow you to continue using your calendar as you would normally, but if you’re experience suggests otherwise, I’d want to make sure we had that logged in our system as a bug to address.

[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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