Deleting Multiple Events & Category of Events: Issues with iCal Importer

[Amie]

So, to start I have experienced tons of issues that were not addressed under your Knowledgbase documentation when importing multiple events using the iCal plugin.

1) First, I have imported all my events and they are organized by category. When all said and done, there were over 4,000 events!

2) Come to find out, your plugin duplicated many of the same events. I have spent hours reading your website and there is nothing that tells me about this issue except one post from back in 2012. (I finally found that using a Google search as nothing would come up regarding the topic using the search engine on your site. Very frustrating!!)

3) Now I have over 1,000 events that need to be deleted. There is NOTHING that tells me how I delete an entire category of events without having to manually delete events in the WP admin interface. So here I am 2.5 hours into manually deleting all events (with 600 to go) to try and wipe out the initial import and re-import events again and hope nothing duplicates. My client is VERY unhappy with me and your plugin at this point as I thought originally it had something to do with their Google Calendar, but turns out, it has to do with the iCal Importer. Thanks guys for no documentation on this.

4) So far, your plugin has brought me nothing but headaches and wasted hours of my time. It would be kind of you to at least offer chat support. Thank you!

[Nico]

Hi Amie,

Thanks for reaching out to us, and really sorry to hear you are not having a good experience with our plugins so far. Let me try to revert this situation…

1) First, I have imported all my events and they are organized by category. When all said and done, there were over 4,000 events!

The plugin is designed to prevent event duplication when you re import the same iCal feed or .ics file. If this didn’t work as expected you might be hitting a bug here. Can you describe the steps to reproduce this? Were you performing a recurring import?

2) Come to find out, your plugin duplicated many of the same events. I have spent hours reading your website and there is nothing that tells me about this issue except one post from back in 2012.

iCal importer is our newest plugin, just released a couple of months ago. This is the reason why you couldn’t find much related threads or documentation. Regarding your comment on the lack of knowledge base articles, I can feel you there: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase-category/ical-importer/ – we have just 3 articles so far. If you are up to it, I would like to hear any suggestions for upcoming articles on iCal importer you might have.

3) Now I have over 1,000 events that need to be deleted. There is NOTHING that tells me how I delete an entire category of events without having to manually delete events in the WP admin interface.

There are a couple of plugins that might help you with ‘Bulk deleting’ in WordPress. I haven’t tried any myself, but Bulk Delete looks like an appropriate option for this case, you can delete by custom post type (events) and by custom taxonomy (event categories).

4) So far, your plugin has brought me nothing but headaches and wasted hours of my time. It would be kind of you to at least offer chat support. Thank you!

Again, I’m sorry for the poor experience you are having with iCal importer. Unfortunately our premium forum is the only channel for support we offer at the time. We do our best to set customer’s expectations about the type of support we provide. If there is something you saw or read that suggested we provide other channels for support, please let us know so that we can prevent any other miscommunication in the future.

All this said, if you -and/or your client- are not happy with our product we can also process a refund for your order (within 30 days of purchase). We would be sad to see you part, but of course it won’t be fair to chain you to a product you are not happy with.

Please let me know about this, and I hope to help you revert this initial bad experience here,
Best,
Nico

[Amie]

This reply is private.

[Amie]

This reply is private.

[Nico]

Hey Amie,

Thanks for following up on this!

Let’s do something: before you try to re-import the events once again, I’ll make sure everything is set up correctly and that event duplication is not happening! I’ll test this in my local install before moving forward if that’s ok with you. To do so, I’ll need:

– The URL to the iCal feed – this article describes how to get it: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/import-events-from-google-calendar/.
– Your system information: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/.

With that information I’ll try to import the ‘Pizza Night’ events series and make sure there’s no undesired duplication upon re-import as well.

Thanks,
Nico

[Amie]

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[Amie]

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• This reply was modified 10 years, 7 months ago by Amie.

[Nico]

Hi Amie,

Thanks for following up on this once again!

Everything look fine in the system info of you site. I just have an observation on the timezone settings: as the feed contains events from New York (I guess this from the URL you shared), you should set the WordPress timezone to New York as well. Maybe that’s why you where seeing an offset on the events date/time. Specially if the events occurs near the end of the day, this can make them last two days instead of one.

Regarding the feed I need the ‘private iCal Address’ please check Step 2 in this link: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/import-events-from-google-calendar/.

On the troubleshooting: I intend to make a test with ‘Pizza night’ events to see if they are importing in the correct date and time. If those events import correctly I can go ahead and import all the calendar to make sure we are in a good spot.

Please let me know about the feed URL so I can run this tests,
Best,
Nico

[Amie]

This reply is private.

[Amie]

Also, please note that in Google, the options they give for Timezones are based on country and time zone in the format of GMT (and there are other options if you are international). I have Eastern Time selected correctly. In the Events Calendar, I notice after an Event imports, it has a default value different from that so your plugin isn’t recognizing the time zone. Perhaps one of my settings I posted above is incorrect, however I don’t know how to know if it is or not. Going in and manually changing the time zone for each event is not what my client nor I want to do as there are too many events.

Thank you!

[Amie]

This reply is private.

[Amie]

Hi,

To help I have taken screenshots with a few of the events side by side so you can see how the information from Google Calendar is not importing correctly and duplicating. If you would like to see them, please let me know where to send them.

Thanks,
Amie

[Nico]

Hi Amie,

Thanks for following-up once again! With the feed URL I was able to test this locally and indeed I’m seeing some wonky behavior. On one hand the events are getting correctly imported, but on the other hand I do see some ‘phantom’ duplicates (without author and other info). I’m also seeing some events from 2007, 2010 and 2012 that shouldn’t be imported at all. I’m sharing this case with the dev team tomorrow and we’ll try to find some patter on this issues (the root of the problem). It’s probable you are hitting a bug here, because this is the first I see this strange behavior.

Please send me the screenshots as well, you can upload them to cloudup.com (or a similar image sharing service) and paste the links in the reply here,
Thanks,
Nico

PS: Sorry for the delay, we do not work on the weekend and Mondays are particularly busy for that reason.

[Amie]

So after spending another day trying to manually delete repeated events from the Special Events category, I am so happy you have come to my rescue! Here is what I have learned through this process:

1. The duplication occurs when events on the Google Calendar are set up as repeating events or have the time set as All Day events so there is no official start or end time. For example, an event on Google Calendar reoccurs weekly (ie., a Sunday Brunch) or every other week (ie., Happy Hour). The Events Calendar doesn’t recognize repeating events and so it explodes and creates tons of duplicates.

Would upgrading to the PRO version help? I see you just released a new version with new capability. https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/pro-recurring-events

2. When a Reoccurring iCal feed updated, it pulled old events dating from 2008 and I noticed many of these events in the Google Calendar are set as repeated events without an end date (only they were stopped by the Admin of the Google Calendar at some point in the past so I didn’t see them). Events calendar would then regurgitate each event as a repeating event on a daily basis. Literally hundreds of duplicate events were created this way…

3. I think I found the reason the Dining Events calendar did not import in its entirety the second time after my first mass deletion. I read it here in the forum today #12: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/running-a-saved-recurring-import-with-the-ical-importer
Events that have been imported and deleted after import will not come back during future imports. I get why you do it, but with the duplication issue, I think this means I have to go back in and manually add Dining events. Perhaps reinstalling the entire plugin and starting again from scratch would help fix that issue?

[Nico]

Hey Amie,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply 🙂

1. I’ll create the corresponding Bug Report for this issue. I’ll let you know if I have a timeline of any information about this issue after sharing the bug report with the product manager.

2. I’ll look logging this bug as well, it seems to relate with what you described in #1. Saved imports should respect the date range / search you’ve made to the original feed when saved.

3. Yeap! This feature is designed to prevent recurring saved imports to re-create deleted events. This ‘deleted events’ are stored in the database, so re-installing the plugin won’t help to clear that data. Here’s a snippet you can add to your theme functions.php file -located at wp-content/themes/your_theme/:

/*
* Prevents iCal importer from saving a copy of "deleted" events
* This means when you rerun an import, it will reimport any events you previously deleted
*/
function tribe_ical_dont_save_deleted () {
$ical_importer = Tribe__Events__Ical_Importer__Main::instance();
remove_action( 'before_delete_post', array( $ical_importer, 'deletedEventSave' ) );
}
add_action( 'wp_loaded', 'tribe_ical_dont_save_deleted' );


On the same note I can provide a snippet to clear out ‘deleted events’ records from the database, please let me know if you think it will be necessary.

Thanks a lot for your patience on this,
Best,
Nico

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