Creating recurring events in advance doesn't work anymore

[Benjamin Roe]

I have my General Settings set to create recurring events in advance 3 months out. It used to be that this worked exactly as you would expect. When you setup an event, it would populate the calendar with three months of that event, then as each day passed it would automatically continue to populate out to three months without needing any attention. Almost a year ago, it stopped working that way. Now it only populates out to three months whenever I update the event. So, even if my events don’t need any changes, I still have to go in and update all of them every three months just to get them to continue showing up on the calendar. It’s extremely frustrating. Is this a known bug? Was it an intentional change? I like my calendar not populating too far in the future, so I can make changes to programming without ever having inaccurate information posted on my calendar, but it takes forever to update every event and it’s not something I have the time to sustain.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Benjamin,

Thanks so much for reaching out again here!

I’m not able to immediately replicate the issue that you are describing.

Would you mind providing me with a screenshot of how one of your events is set up on the back end, so that I can try to replicate the behavior that you are describing?

Let me know if you have any other questions in the meantime!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Benjamin Roe]

Here’s an event called LCG Night.

[Benjamin Roe]

Here are two shots of our calendar, a before and after. All I did between these two pictures was hit “Edit All”, take some screen shots, and hit “Update”. In the before, you’ll see that LCG Night has decided not to show up beginning August 1st. In the after, it’s on there for August 1st (and showing up through October 10th).

Thanks!

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Benjamin,

Thanks for providing me with that information.

It is possible that you are seeing this issue because the event is very old and has many recurrences, including custom exclusions, which can sometimes cause issues.

If it is doable for you, I’d recommend starting over with this event and creating a new one for the future.

Let me know if that works for you!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Benjamin Roe]

Hey Jaime! Those exclusions are actually automated by the Events Calendar. I have it set to show past events for two years, and apparently the Event Calendar’s solution to that is to start generating “custom” exclusions for instances of the event that are more than two years old, which it also only seems to do when I update the event. I have lots of weekly events, many of which are as old as this one, and many of which are relatively new. Unfortunately, this problem affects all of them, so it can’t just be a matter of my event being too old. I realize it’s a difficult problem to replicate because it involves at least a day to see what the calendar does each day, but it seems like it’s a bug (or bizarre feature) in the coding for the way the calendar knows how to show or hide events with no expiration.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Benjamin,

Unfortunately I cannot replicate this issue, even though I have tried to simulate the issue that you are seeing.

Is it possible for you to create a new event and delete old events, so that they can properly update?

I know this isn’t an automated solution, but it should help to automate things going forward.

Let me know your thoughts!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Benjamin Roe]

I could definitely do that, but I have events as recent as a month or two old that are still affected by the same bug, so I’m not convinced the age of the events has much to do with it. And unless I’m sure that’s a solution, it’s actually quite a lot of work to do, given the volume of weekly events I have.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Benjamin,

I completely understand.  Can you take a screenshot of one of the recent events that is having this issue, so that I can try to replicate that as well?

As I mentioned, I haven’t been able to replicate the issue yet, so I’m hesitant to call it a bug at this point.

In the meantime, please follow our Testing for Conflicts Guide (basically switch to Twenty Seventeen theme and deactivate all plugins and custom code other than Modern Tribe plugins) and see if that helps narrow down the cause of this.

Note that https://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-detective/ may prove helpful as well. (third-party, not guaranteed or supported by us)

Can you please also enable WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG and share any debug messages you see?

Let me know how that goes!

 

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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