Event Will Not Occur

[cliffy]

Hi, when editing an event, (other than being really slow, to the point of timing out, though that could be my version of Chrome which doesn’t seem to work well with WordPress (or perhaps my hosting company)) I see a lot of “Event will not occur” dates listed. With the latest version of TEC Pro, I see that I can now delete them (nice that you added the option), BUT, for each of my 107 events, there are almost 50 “Event will not occur” dates.

Q1: Are these are taking up room in the database?
Q2: Is there a way to delete ALL of these dates in one go? (either database wide, or per event) all 5000+ of them.

Thanks,
I really like the new repeat event layout!

[cliffy]

p.s. I have two websites (soon to be three) with this amount of events. So that’s at least 10,000 old events.

[Andras]

Hello Cliffy,

Thanks for reaching out to us and sorry about the issues you are having. Let me try to help you solve them.

Wow, 10.000 events, that’s impressive. All events are saved in the database, even old ones, so yes, they are taking up room there. This many events can indeed lead to a slower performing site. For this I recommend you to read this article: Performance Considerations

It is possible to delete multiple events at one. For this I would recommend using a plugin like Bulk Delete, which should help speed up the process. Note that this plugin is not maintained by us so we cannot give support for that, and it would be worth making a full backup of your website before, just in case something would go wrong.

Also, taking into considerations the amount you want to delete, I would do it in chunks of a couple hundred, so that you don’t get a timeout or server overload.

I hope these help and please, let me know if you have any more questions.

Cheers,
Andras

[cliffy]

Hi, you misunderstand the issue.

My calendar has 107 repeat events throughout the week. They go on forever, every day, every week, every year.

I have the settings to “Clean up recurring events after” 1 month and “Create recurring events in advance for” 3 months, The 10,000 comes from 107 events x 52 weeks (x 2 websites).

For EACH event, when I go into EDIT, there is a list of dates for which the event does NOT take place (“Event will not occur”). See the attached screenshot.

There are over 40 “Event will not occur” dates on this event alone.

Until a recent update to the plugin, there was no way to delete these. Until a previous update of that, you never saw them (unless they were user created (these are not so I have no idea where they are coming from).
I can not delete all these manually, not do I want to start messing with the database.

107 events x 52 weeks x 2 websites x 40+ ‘event does not take place’ adds up to almost 490,000 records.

My site is timing out when I try to edit events.

I hope this is clearer.

Many thanks,
C

[Andras]

Hey Cliffy,

Thanks for the clarification on that.

(It was possible to remove them before as well, by setting the dropdown to none I believe. But I agree it was not intuitive, that is why we changed that.)

Looking at the screenshot I see one issue there, namely the recurrence rule doesn’t say whether it is day, month or week.

As for the exceptions, if I’m not mistaken these are all stored in one entry (one entry per recurring event) in the wp_postmeta table, so this shouldn’t create the 400.000 records in the database.

The exclusion rules seem to be like exclude weekly on the same day.

So much about analyzing the issue.

Did you start seeing these issues after a plugin update? Before that all was working fine?

In this case one option would be rolling back to a previous version, removing there these exceptions. Then updating the plugins and creating any exceptions you might need.

The other option would be simply deleting all events, remove them from trash and re-create them.

Let me know.

Cheers,
Andras

[cliffy]

Great, just 10000 records then. I didn’t actually realise it at the time, but this issue is hanging my browser. It is timing out / not responding. Both Firefox and Chrome do ask if you want to wait so pressing yes, keeps loading. It can take almost 60 seconds to load an event. Once you delete the exceptions, update the event, it will load OK.

Note:

I have never set any exclude date. These have all come from your software / programming (so presume it is a bug).

These are NOT actually exclude dates. These are dates that the event has taken place in the past.

You are correct, when the event eventually opens, the Event Series: is not highlighted. (again, this has happened since the new interface update). If I click weekly, I see the details of course.

Deleting these events is no option. It will take far far too long to do so. Each one has detailed information such as graphics, text, venue, etc etc.

How do you suggest I go back to a previous version of TEC and TEC Pro if this is my only option – (other than to manually delete each one exception over time, as I update the calendar (e.g. do 5 events each time I login into the site to do updates). Incidentally, some of these events have been running (recurring) on a weekly basis for at least the past 2.5 years.

[Andras]

Hi Cliffy,

Again, I’m really sorry this has happened with the update. It is pretty unusual and we haven’t had any other reports on this.

I’ll try to pull in someone from the team to take a look at this as well. Please hang in there.

Thanks,

Andras

[George]

Hi Cliffy,

Thanks for your patience here.

These are some odd issues that we have not otherwise seen, so some more investigating will be required here.

Please do not yet downgrade your versions of The Events Calendar and Events Calendar Pro. From the look of things that may only complicate the situation here.

---

A Clarification of The Issues

To make things simpler here and help us help you, let’s temporarily refrain from discussing the entire body of events on your two sites. Let’s just focus on one event and use it as a specific example/illustration.

Let’s just refer to the one event you shared a screenshot of (this screenshot, for reference: https://theeventscalendar.com/content/uploads/2017/01/6ba1f90df9f8d821.jpg)

It sounds like the problems are as follows:

1. For this event, the “Event series:” UI is not correct because it says that the events will happen “Every 1”, but does not specify if that means every 1 week, or every 1 day, or every 1 month, etc.

2. While the UI as seen in the screenshot is broken, the event does display correctly in the actual front-end calendar.

3. Next, the event UI lists a whole bunch of dates in the “Event will not occur on:” section. None of these dates should be listed as “exclusions”.

☝️ To help us get 100% on the same page about the exact nature of these issues and provide a solution, can you please specify if each one of the three things above is an accurate description of your problems? If my summary is wrong for a given number, please specify exactly how. Ideally you could do so in this format, for example:

1. Yes that’s correct.
2. No, the events do not display correctly in the front-end either.
3. Yes that’s correct.

Thank you in advance for a detailed reply along these lines. We are determined to help resolve this and in to do so in such a way that does not require you to delete events or have to manually update thousands of them or anything like that.

Thanks,
George

[cliffy]

Hey George,

I’m replying under my business email address, hope that’s OK.

Thank you for getting back to me so promptly.

1. This is correct – (the Weekly Event Series is not highlighted)
2. Correct – (as far as I can tell there are no issues what so ever on the
front-end)
3. Correct

As previously mentioned, the first ‘Event will not occur:’ date is exactly
one week after the Start date of the event, and the next is one week after
that. I guess somehow, after the events took place, they were put into the
not occur date. I actually have 3 sites (all my TEC Pro licences) where
this is happening.

I am happy to give you WP Admin Access if you wish. I can also take a
backup with Duplicator and send it via WeTransfer too if that would help.

Let me know how I can help further.

[George]

Thanks for your patience over the weekend, Cliffy. I hope things are well (aside from these site issues! 🙂 ).

I appreciate your confirming of things in the list format per my request—thank you! I have a much better sense of the issues and we have actually seen similar things a handful times over the years.

The summary of what’s happening is this:

• Your events should generally be okay here, as evidenced by their showing-up correctly on the front end.
• The problem is arising from the updates we’ve done to the Recurrence Engine within our plugins—the framework of code that generates, interprets, and stores the various “rules” for recurring events.
• Events that have no “end date” (like yours here) rely heavily on these stored rules, because future event instances are generated on-the-fly with these rules indefinitely.
• So of the recurrence rules stored in your events’ meta data is…”corrupted”, for lack of a better word: they may generate event instances on the front-end without issue, but the rules are formatted differently than new rules within our plugins, and so they won’t mesh well with the new recurrence UI.

I hope this explanation is useful to some degree.

---

The Good News

We can totally help here, and should be able to come up with a code-based solution for you here that will help you update all of these events across your different sites without either losing existing event data or manually updating each single event yourself.

The Bad News

This process is not immediate, and it may take us a couple of days to come up with a solution and test it.

The Next Steps from Here

You mention being able to share a database backup with us. This would be super helpful, and will help us test our solutions with your real data to help ensure a smooth process for you without data loss.

1. Can you get Database exports of all of your affected sites? Or only one?

2. If there’s a site you don’t have the database export tool on, can you try to contact your web host and ask for a database dump from them instead? They may be able to provide a database export which would be helpful for those other sites.

3. When you have all three database exports, can you upload them to a site like Google Drive, or Dropbox, or CloudUp, etc., and then share those download links here so that we can download your export files?

4. Once you do that we will start tinkering and working on a solution for you. It will likely be a little utility plugin that you install, activate, then click a button; then an “update” process will run until all affected events are fixed, at which point you could remove this little utility plugin.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks,
George

[cliffy]

Hi George,

Thanks for the reply. I don’t seem to have had an email that you did. Is this because I replied directly via email rather than being logged into the support forum and typing here?

I can install Duplicator on all sites and take a backup for you to test with. I’ll add them to dropbox and send you the link below in Private.

Many thanks,

[cliffy]

This reply is private.

[George]

Thanks a ton for this data, Cliffy, and for your continued patience and persistence of course 🙂 Hope you had a good weekend.

In regards to your questions here:

---

• I am not sure why you didn’t get an email notice about my reply. ? It indeed may have something to do with the reply-by-email features invoked here. Those are recently-launched features we custom built ourselves, so there could be a bug there and I will mention this to the lead developer of that project.

---

• As for the issues you describe with DeskTopServer and your web host’s unique configurations regarding the media directory and /var/r/ and such, I am admittedly not sure how much this will affect our investigation and recommendations here, either.

I was able to download your files successfully and it seems like this is plenty for us to do some digging. I will be working with other members of our team on this.

Stay tuned for more insight here — thank you in advance for your patience while we investigate and tinker!

— George

[cliffy]

This reply is private.

[George]

This reply is private.

[Author]

Posts