Event Imports from Other URL not working after bringing site back online

[Luke]

We had a site where we used Event Aggregator to pull in events from another site. Basically, one of our client’s sites was “the source” and we got a license for Event Aggregator for this other one to pull from there on a daily basis so that they matched.

It worked initially for a one-time import, going through the motions of seeing the preview events and such, and when that was successful, we set up a daily import and it’s been updating ever since.

There are really only two people who ever go into the back end with any frequency, though, and neither had visited the site in a while because there just weren’t a lot of requests to do work for it. One of those people mentioned there was a database connection error and come to find out the site had been hacked. Redirect files in the root folder, a truncated wp_options table; it was bad.

So the host, GoDaddy, says nuke everything to make sure it’s all gone for good and then just re-import the site like you did when you initially brought it over from the dev hosting. In other words, bring it live again. You’ll lose a bit of the interim work but at least everything will be safe.

We did that, and everything seems to work great, except now the event importing from that other site won’t work. It wants to do it but just hangs, and hangs, and hangs. There are some events that are carried over from when it was a dev site (though there’s no bulk restore for ignored events anymore) so we can see that all the page templates, the styles, etc….all work and look good.

We aren’t even so much concerned about older events. We just want the process back that retrieves it. It worked well before and the only thing that changed was that site was attacked, but then it was rebuilt clean in place.

If I’m not mistaken you have mentioned that there’s a sort of pass-through for imports on your servers here, for a few different reasons I forget but partially to monitor the rate limit. I let it go for a day or two because there were more than our limit (100) events that were old to bring in, but now even with a scheduled import set to just get new stuff (of which there’s maybe a dozen or so?) it acts like it doesn’t want to try.

Normally I’d think something like a memory issue but it’s the same site as pre-hacking which handled things great with whatever server configuration it has always had.

This is the site we’re pulling from if it matters: http://saseafoodco.com/events/

Thank you so much for your time!

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Luke,

Thanks so much for reaching out!

This isn’t currently a confirmed issue so I’d suggest following these recommended troubleshooting steps for your own site:

There might be some new updates available. Could you please make sure all your Modern Tribe plugins (and WordPress core) are at their latest versions?

• Downloads / Version Numbers
• License Keys
• TEC Automatic Updates
• or TEC Manual Updates
• WordPress core updates

Once you verify you’re on the latest versions, please test to see if the issue is still happening for you.

Also, can you enable and check the Event Log under Events < Help to see if you see anything unusual?

Right under that is your Event Aggregator Status. Can you take a screenshot of what you see there?

Let me know how that goes!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Luke]

Yep, everything’s up to date!

I didn’t even realize that logging existed, let alone that it needed to be turned on by default, so apologies for that. I did go ahead and set it for full reporting. That will be very useful!

I’ve also attached a screenshot of the status area per your request.

As it happens, I forgot to check back in on this thread, and in the interim, three of four imports went just fine at times really early in the morning. The latest has a red exclamation error icon, and when I hover over it there’s some HTML that can be picked out if I do “Inspect Element” which indirectly leads to this:

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/url-import-errors-event-aggregator/

Cause:
Similarly to the “Bad Data” error above this happens when the archive page EA Service is trying to fetch provides inconsistent or bad data in regards to the page number, the totals or the format.

This could be due to a communication error between EA service and the source site or due to a custom modification of The Events Calendar REST API that provides a response in a format we can read.

It also said to visit (beginning of the address truncated):

wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=tribe_events&page=tribe-common&tab=imports#tribe-field-tribe_aggregator_default_url_import_range%22

So I looked at the range and moved it from three months to one month; shouldn’t be an enormous difference since it’s a daily operation, and then in case there are server issues on either end, it’s less of an “ask” when the request gets issued.

I have this as “still need assistance” just in case I’m talking out of my butt and need clarification/correction, but please feel free to mark it resolved if we’re on the right track, and thank you for taking the time to look into this!

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Luke,

Glad to hear that we have made some progress with this issue.

It sounds like things are working as expected now, which is great!

I’m happy to leave this thread open until it self-closes in three weeks of no activity, in the event that you have any other questions or need further assistance with this issue.

 

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

[Author]

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