Duplicate events in Google Calendar import since 4.5.9

[webpivot]

Hi,
We are importing a couple Google calendars (School and Athletics) with about 350 and 250 events in the next year respectively. We successfully tested and had these imports running on a schedule for the past few months with now problems. Well, recently, the Athletics one started misbehaving and pulling in all sorts of duplicates – for example, the most recent Athletics calendar import says “246 new, 7 update.” And if we run it again, it will say the same thing, and create hundreds of new events and update a small fraction.

Meanwhile, the most recent School calendar import simply says “352 updated”.

Here are the calendar URLS:

Athletics – giving us problems: https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/wchsonline.org_20o5c5h11qpm07c8dflgkn29s4%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

School – seems fine at the moment:
https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/wchsonline.org_inubaf4ll49tmovqd80a164qb4%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

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PLEASE LEAVE FOR SUPPORT
Reporting the same issue as: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/duplicate-events-from-google-calenar/

[Courtney]

Hello Mark

I’m sorry this is happening. We are working to narrow down exactly what is causing this issue. In the meantime, there are a few options we can try to resolve this would help us narrow this down faster.

Would you mind enabling WP_DEBUG and sharing any PHP errors you see while navigating your site’s home page, events page, single-event pages, and any other of your site’s pages relevant to this ticket?

Once you share your WP_DEBUG findings, we may be able to get an idea of any plugin or theme conflicts.

Please enable WP_DEBUG on your site. You’ll need to edit to your site’s wp-config.php file and change this line of code: define('WP_DEBUG', false); to this: define('WP_DEBUG', true);
(or add this line of code if you can’t find mention of ‘WP_DEBUG’ in your wp-config.php file)

If any errors do appear while navigating your site’s pages, please copy and paste them in their entirety into a new ticket reply — along with the URL of where you saw the error(s) — and make sure you set it as a Private reply.

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If you don’t see any WP_DEBUG messages while browsing your site, could you try temporarily activating the default Twenty Fifteen theme, and seeing if the issue persists.

If disabling the theme fixes it, we have narrowed the issue down to a theme conflict. Do you have any theme overrides for the Events Calendar? If so could you try disabling them by renaming your [themename]/tribe-events/ folder to ‘tribe-events-bak’. Did that fix it?

If the issue persists in the default Twenty Fifteen theme, then we have a different set of debugging steps. Please keep the Twenty Fifteen theme enabled, and also disable any plugins other than the ones from Modern Tribe to see if that fixes it. If it does, please try re-enabling the plugins one at a time until the issue resurfaces. When it does resurface, can you let me know which plugin caused that to happen?

Thanks
Courtney 🙂

[Rocky Hayes]

I’m seeing the same issue on http://elriad.org/events/

I’m at 6 instances of each post right now.

I did try the debug and theme plan that you suggested, but this issue is related to the import of events, not really the theme or conflicting plugins, so there’s no way to “re-create” because I’ve already hit my import cap for the day.

It’s also odd that the original post has the Author assigned, but the rest are blank. (see attached image).

[Rocky Hayes]

Also, if you have any suggestions on how to remove these duplicates that would be helpful! 🙂

[Courtney]

Hi Rocky

We can now confirm and are aware of this bug, and are very sorry this is happening to quite a few users. We have what we believe is the fix, we expect it to ship soon. We will notify you here as soon as that is available.

Thanks
Courtney ?

[Rocky Hayes]

Thanks, Courtney. When might I expect a resolution? Right now the calendar has significant duplication and I’ve been receiving complaints.

[Courtney]

Hi Rocky – I can’t make any promises but would hope to see this fixed our upcoming maintenance release, less than a week away. Until then, https://wordpress.org/plugins/bulk-delete/ might be useful for bulk deleting. I haven’t worked out the fastest way yet to delete duplicates. I’ll spend some time on this and be sure that tip is shared when we push out the fix.

Again, so sorry for this huge inconvenience.

Thanks
Courtney 🙂

[Rocky Hayes]

Courtney,

What’s the latest?

[Courtney]

Hey Rocky

It’ll still be a few days before our next routine maintenance release. We will definitely announce it here as soon as it is available.

Thanks
Courtney 🙂

[Jacob]

Hello

I am having this issue as well. I now have 9,404 (mostly duplicate) events in my calendar. Some dates have as many as 300 duplicate events. Is there any way to delete them all at once and then start again? I would like to refrain from going through 471 pages of delete all events. g

[Courtney]

Hi Jacob

At this time I’d suggest trying out https://wordpress.org/plugins/bulk-delete/. I have asked if it is within our scope to have a more efficient solution at this time. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks
Courtney 🙂

[Victor]

Hello There!

Just wanted to share with you that a new maintenance release (for the Week of 7 August 2017) is out, along with some Event Aggregator server improvements and fixes that solves this issue.

Find out more about this release → https://theeventscalendar.com/maintenance-release-week-7-august-2017/

Please update the plugins and let us know if the fix works for your site.

Best,
Victor

[Jacob]

I tried Courtney’s fix and used the Bulk Delete plugin. That put 5000+ of the 9000+ (mostly duplicate) events into an “IGNORE” status. Then I added the Google Calendar back. That fix only added 40 events and then stopped, most of which were at the end of the academic year. So now I am stuck going through and trying to delete all of the IGNORED plugins, but of course that only allows me to delete 20 at a time.

[Rocky Hayes]

I went through and deleted all events, then re-imported. Still seeing issues. Not only that, but the previous imports that I had setup were not showing in my import tabs, my only options were new or history – that is until I setup the import again – then my old one showed up the in the list (I promptly deleted it).

I also noticed a number of issues within the plugin as I attempted to delete old posts. I received numerous error screens and one “you don’t have permission to delete that” screens. In each instance I was able to run the task again and in went through – but this was disturbing.

The latest release said that it fixed this bug – but it seems to have failed, and added in other issues. I’m happy to turn over logins to my site to let TEC support take a look and sort out the problem if needed.

[Rocky Hayes]

I don’t know if this helps – but all of the duplicate events do not have an author – that field is blank in all duplicates but in the normal events is filled with my user account. Second – past events do not have duplicates – but all future events are duplicated.

The way that I found to delete duplicates was to filter by “mine” instead of just “published” or “all” – this takes out the duplicates – then I added a tag to all of the “mine” results with the bulk editor. Finally, I again opened the “all” or “published” view and organized the results by tag – this left me with a set of results – the duplicates, which I could then delete.

Doesn’t solve the problem, but cleans it up for now.

[Author]

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