Duplicate events and times off by 1-hour

[Kevin Powell]

I just launched our site a couple weeks ago. Just prior to launch I used the iCal Importer to do a final import of events from our Google Calendars.

During early usage, I experienced duplicate events being imported, but that was corrected with one of the four updates that were released between Aug 3 and Sept 5. I did one final import just prior to launch (with what’s now the latest version). I thought it went off without a hitch, however, it appears that the event times are off by an 1-hour. Older imported events appear to be correct, so I have to conclude that the issue cropped up during the last release. I have to also assume that a high percentage of events are affected.

So, now I’ve just updated to the latest version of everything and have followed the directions to migrate iCal Importer settings and remove it—to make way for the new Event Aggregator.

During the first test on the staging environment it imported 382 events and only 3 of them were deemed as pre-existing. The remaining 379 events are now duplicates. Additionally, all duplicated events are off by the same 1-hour despite both Google Calendar and WordPress being set to UTC-5.

So, it would appear that the previous duplication issue has returned and a new timezones issue has cropped up.

It was just brought to my attention so I haven’t yet determined exactly how many events are affected. At the moment, it would appear that most every event after this month may be off by 1-hour (ie. 1 pm vs noon). I really need to get all the event times corrected. I’d do an import to correct them if I could, but doing so appears to just compound the problems.

I deactivated all plugins and switched to a default WP theme while troubleshooting other issues, but I haven’t done so in order to test this one in particular. However, based on the number of posts I see about others having similar issues—I assume it wouldn’t be of great benefit to so.

[Cliff]

Hi Kevin.

Thanks for your detailed question. Sorry you experienced this.

Event Aggregator should have seamlessly taken over for iCal Importer. Additionally, it’s much less buggy than iCal Importer, especially for some edge case scenarios.

I know that doesn’t make you feel better for your specific situation, but hopefully it encourages you for the long term.

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1)

Anyway, yes, there is a current bug in The Events Calendar (not Event Aggregator to my knowledge) for timezones being off by an hour (i.e. not accounting for DST). For this issue, I’ll mark this ticket as Pending Fix, which means this thread should receive a reply once the applicable fix has been released. I cannot guarantee when it will be fixed as it’s in the development team’s hands now. They need to assign it, code it, test it, and schedule it for release.

I apologize for this issue and appreciate your understanding and patience.

2)

Some technical information that might help you dig a little deeper:

iCal Importer uses the “deleted_event” custom post type for events that were deleted (technically imported as a “tribe_events” post type and then, if deleted, changes to this sort of hidden “deleted_event” post type so iCal Importer can know not to import it again in the future. The verbiage used in Event Aggregator for these is ignored events.

EA registers a new custom post type of “tribe-ea-record”, which is used as a placeholder for the rules.

iCal Importer stored the “UID” of each event imported (if you look at an .ics file, there should be a UID per event) to keep track of what events from the feed would match the events previously imported.

Since EA runs on our servers instead of yours, this UID isn’t stored in your database anymore, although I’d guess the EA postmeta’s hash could be backtracked on our server to its original UID.

So, all that to say there are a lot of moving pieces here and I can’t really advise you of anything you can see in your database to check if that’s the reason for the duplicates.

The only other issue I’m aware of that may be at play here is if you are trying to import iCal feeds where each event is not assigned a UID (which I believe sometimes happens with Outlook calendars. If we can’t match an event’s UID, we can’t know that it’s the same event and therefore both iCal Importer and EA would import it and you, the user, would say, “Hey, why are you importing a duplicate?!”

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You sound knowledgeable about your site’s setup so hopefully all these details give you some insightful information.

Let me know if you think I can be of further service here.

[Geoff]

Hi Kevin,

We wanted to let you know that we were unable to get a fix for this issue in the latest maintenance release that we shipped this week. Our team did spend a considerable amount of time looking into the issue of Daylight Savings Time not being taken into consideration with an iCal file export but were unable to replicate the issue after many repeated and individual tests.

We are still interested in pinpointing why the behavior exists in this case but it will take some more digging to properly diagnose whether the issue exists in all cases before we can plan a release for a solution.

In the meantime, we would really appreciate it if you would update your plugins to the latest versions and test whether the issue persists. If it does, then it would be great if you could run through the steps outlined in this guide and let us know if you notice and difference in behavior when your site (or a separate test site, ideally) is in a default WordPress environment.

Thanks so much for bearing with us while we work on this together.

Geoff

[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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