Delete all records because of duplication bug

[crash6711]

Hey guys, love the event calendar plugin, but I have a huge problem now. About a year or two ago I upgraded to the Pro version and helped the client create some recurring events. Since then I’ve updated it every quarter or so and at 1 point, a LOT of events got duplicated, I have over 120,000 events instead of about 400. I need to erase everything and start fresh.
I’ve searched through the forums here and found many many many people posting the same problem, with no luck on a verified solution. I know the issue was only for an older version (3.5-ish?), and now I have the newest version of 3.8.1 so it’s probably been fixed by now. But I have the problem of not being able to get rid of all the duplicate entries. I’ve read into, and tried the solutions offered of pressing the button in the plugin settings screen to consolidate duplicates, downloading and running the hotfix plugin to consolidate them, and even the Event Rocket plugin for deleting all event data to start fresh. The last option is the only one that kind of works, but the problem is that it only deletes about 120 events at a time, then hangs at about 1 minute. I tried letting it go for 2 hours, but it didn’t do anything after that initial minute with the 120. It varies between 80-150 each time. the problem is that with 119,204 events left, it would take me 993 more times of doing that to get it to zero, and each time takes about 2 minutes because loading is so bogged down. I need to completely erase all events or the database or whatever it takes to start fresh, how can I do that?
I love the plugin, but unfortunately this has caused a decent waste of time now already between trying to delete things manually, searching FAQ’s, forums, downloading and trying various plugins, and now writing in for help.
Thanks,
-Dave

[Barry]

Hi Dave,

Unfortunately we don’t have any other official tools at our disposal that we can offer you.

I happen to be the author of Event Rocket but it’s actually an unofficial project I run in my own time and we can’t offer support for that here.

Even so, I’m surprised to hear it fails like this for you – and wonder if something else is actually conflicting with it and so preventing it from continuing to work away. So, temporarily deactivating everything but Event Rocket and then trying to use the cleanup tool could be one avenue.

Definitely feel free to hit me up in the Event Rocket forum (on wordpress.org) if you need more help on that count and I’ll assist as best I can and as time allows 🙂

Alternatively, WP CLI could be worth a look. I appreciate not everyone has a hosting environment available that makes it viable to install this very useful tool – but it could, potentially, offer you an alternative means of dealing with this issue.

Would either of those be worth investigation?

[crash6711]

Hi Barry, thanks for helping out, but yes I did disable the other plugins and the theme, but got the same results.

I don’t need support for the Event Rocket plugin, I just need to wipe or delete the database containing the events so I can start fresh.

[Barry]

Sure – however, as before, there are no other tools we can suggest to assist with this. You might consider doing it by crafting some SQL and running them directly against your database, though.

If you want to give this a try then, of course, please do take the time to backup your database and make yourself aware of how to restore that backup before you begin.

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'tribe_events';

The above query gives the basic form for removing all event posts – but you may need to tweak it slightly if you see that your database tables use something other than the wp_ prefix, for instance.

That will leave a lot of orphaned post meta entries which, though not harmful, would ideally also be tidied up. You might use something like this to handle that (note that is will tidy all orphaned post meta data, not merely that which belonged to events):

DELETE FROM wp_postmeta 
WHERE post_id NOT IN (
    SELECT ID FROM wp_posts 
    WHERE ID = post_id
);

This approach should also leave your calendar settings intact, ready for you to start rebuilding event content.

Again, please do take the time to make a backup and ideally perform a dry run on a duplicate database if you can.

Good luck!

[crash6711]

This is not helping whatsoever. Nothing personal against you, but rather to the EventCalendar Pro plugin support team: Your plugin had a bug in it, and caused the plugin to duplicate thousands of events, making the plugin in practically unusable at this point. I now have the updated version on the plugin so it has stopped the problem from getting worse, but the damage has been done and there is no fix for it?? There should be a way to delete a large amount of events. I don’t care about keeping my calendar settings intact, I just want to delete the duplicate events, or I’m even willing to a way to delete all events and manually putting them back in myself for the client. The above suggestion is a little beyond my abilities unless all steps are outlined in complete detail. To be honest, this is becoming a nightmare now. I have done nothing wrong, the plugin has caused me a lot of trouble, and there is no fix for this? I paid for the plugin, and while I understand things happen, I also understand things should be fixed. I hate to say this but after reading the multiple multiple other threads with this same issue, most of which were not actually resolved & just left unanswered due to what I can only guess as frustration- I’m starting to lose faith here.

[Barry]

I’m sorry for the frustration, crash6711.

I realize also I may have misread your opening post: I formed the impression you had exhausted most of the tools and options available but on re-reading I see you may not have tried our official fix for this problem, which is this duplicate cleanup plugin.

We posted this when 3.5.2 was released but perhaps you missed it (and of course I didn’t highlight it’s existence to you, which is my fault entirely).

If you haven’t already done so, can you try using that plugin (following the steps in the blog post I linked to) and see if it helps? Please be aware it may need to be run multiple times if you have a very large number of duplicates.

I hope that helps and apologies once again for the confusion.

[Barry]

Hi! It’s been a while so I’m going to go ahead and close this thread. If we can help with anything else, though, please don’t hesitate to create new threads as needed. Thanks!

[Author]

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