Cleanup Recurring Events: problems with past events cleanup & categories

[3mediaweb]

I am testing this extension to clean up past recurrences of ongoing events for a site with lots of recurring events, and the past events need to be purged/cleaned up within events that are at least a month old. I am encountering the following problems:

1. I cannot reliably clean up old recurrences. When I set the recurrence settings under Evetns -> Settings, I set it to only create events for the next month, and to delete events older than 1 month, but when I head to one recurring event and hit Save, old events don’t seem to be automatically deleted, and the event appears to have created more recurrences through January 2019 (I hit Save today, Dec 11th 2017). So I moved on to just testing by manually entering the ID of the event in question and removing all recurrences.

2. Doing the above now does something odd – it takes the event in question out of its primary category and sub categories under Events, and then the entire primary category it belonged to (along with all sub categories) are completely gone from the site. This in turn knocks out every other event that was under the same primary category and one of its sub categories. I am doing this testing on a dev environment cloned from the live environment, so I compared the list of categories and sure enough, there are many categories missing. I had previously seen these categories in place on dev before I ran the Cleanup tool.

Is this a known issue for anyone else? How can we reliably make sure that we are only deleting past events? I would also like to verify that this tool won’t completely remove categories like this, since all of our client’s events are very meticulously set up with event categories, instructors, venues etc. and we don’t want to lose any of that work.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Marc,

Thanks so much for reaching out!

In general, we tend to only recommend that tool in more extreme cases to remove many recurring events.

As a different, and perhaps gentler approach, I would recommend starting off by adjusting the settings in Events Settings < General.  You can change “Clean up recurring events after” to a smaller time frame to suit your needs.  This should help to clean up events as you go along, while preserving other things set up on your site, such as categories.

Let me know how it goes!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[3mediaweb]

Hi Jaime,

thank you for responding to my query. My further question is, even after changing the event cleanup settings under Events Settings > General, older events aren’t being cleaned up from the site. Does changing the setting and hitting save actually fire off the cleanup process? Or are there additional steps that must be taken? We are primarily looking to clean up all events from October 2017 and older.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Marc,

Changing the setting may not necessary fire the cleanup process immediately, as it is related to when a cron job is fired.  If your site has regular traffic and has no issue with recurring events, this should fire pretty regularly.

In addition, if you are looking for another tool to bulk delete past events (also works with non-recurring), I would recommend trying out a third-party plugin such as Bulk Delete.

Also, please feel free to vote on this idea on our Feature Requests page, as we tend to implement ideas based on custom feedback, so your input is greatly appreciated!

https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/11732886-delete-past-events

Let me know if anything else comes up!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[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

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