Events displaying as 4 hours earlier than imported events

[designoneweb]

We are having the same problems as Donna on a client site. The duplicate event issue we understand is due to a function of the importer plugin and the WP Engine cache not playing nicely with one another. This 4 hour event offset is a new problem. It seems to have appeared after we updated to iCal Importer 4.1.2

I have checked both the client’s Office 365 calendar and the WP settings and Event Calendar settings to confirm that the correct timezone is shown everywhere. U.S. Eastern timezone is properly set. In reading the forum post relating to the iCal Importer update, I noticed the following:

Tweak: Removed use of the date_default_timezone_set function. It’s used in so many other plugins and themes that it was creating some conflicts where it might be used inconsistently.

I wonder if this is what is causing our current problem. This combined with the fact that no one seems to be able to figure out a solution to the duplication of updated events on sites hosted on WP Engine is making it really hard for me to continue promoting The Events Calendar to my clients.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Brook]

Howdy designoneweb,

Thanks for breaking off into a separate topic (for anyone else reading this you can see the related topic here.)

I have checked both the client’s Office 365 calendar and the WP settings and Event Calendar settings to confirm that the correct timezone is shown everywhere. U.S. Eastern timezone is properly set. In reading the forum post relating to the iCal Importer update, I noticed the following: Tweak: Removed use of the date_default_timezone_set function. It’s used in so many other plugins and themes that it was creating some conflicts where it might be used inconsistently.

That function could be the cause of the issue. WP itself uses this function when WP initializes, and preferably no other plugin (ours included) will touch it. Because if one plugin does it can throw the times off for every other plugin that runs after it.

I wonder if this is what is causing our current problem. This combined with the fact that no one seems to be able to figure out a solution to the duplication of updated events on sites hosted on WP Engine is making it really hard for me to continue promoting The Events Calendar to my clients.

Have you seen other folks with WP Engine specific iCal issues? After your comment I tried digging some up but was unable to. I do not see any bugs logged in our system about this so I am wondering if we have missed something here.

We do however have a bug logged about event times being off when imported. One of our QA folks saw this prelaunch of 4.1.2, but so far no one else on the team has been able to reproduce it. I believe the issue eventually went away even for the QA person.

I would like to try testing your event feed on my server. Would you be willing to provide a link to it, perhaps in a private reply? I will then use the settings you shared in your system info to see if I can reproduce this.

Thanks for your thorough debugging and helping Donna! It’s much appreciated.

Cheers!

– Brook

[designoneweb]

Brook,

As I noted in the thread Donna started, reverting back to 4.1.1 resolves the issue. Cliff’s explanation that Eastern Standard Time is not a valid time format doesn’t seem to hold water or reverting back to 4.1.1 shouldn’t fix the problem. While the Microsoft Exchange .ics calendar format does give a timezone of Eastern Standard Time, it also defines the timezone in an offset against UTC, with rules for daylight savings time clearly defined. All previous versions of iCal Importer have seemed to handle this timezone definition just fine. I will attach my client’s ics URL in a separate private reply.

There are similar WP Engine related issues in the forums. See https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/deleted-google-calendar-events-still-showing-up/#post-1054883

I have gone ’round and ’round with both WP Engine and Modern Tribe support to see if there were any way to resolve the issue, but it appears a resolution isn’t in sight. We have narrowed it down to a problem with the WP Engine cache, as when sites are in the WP Engine staging environment with cache disabled, events that have changed in the client’s Office 365 calendar import properly with no duplication.

Thanks for your help!

[designoneweb]

This reply is private.

[Brook]

Howdy again,

Thank you very much for sharing that file. I just tried importing it and the events imported at the same time as they did on Google Calendar and a third party iCal Viewer. For example the event Learn @ Lunch on November 17 imports to the following times in the UTC -4 timezone:

Start: 9:30am
End: 11:00am

Now I am guessing that you actually want this file to run from 11:30 am – 1 pm since this a “lunch” event. But the iCal file is being imported with those dates in every application I have tried. This must mean there is something wrong with the file itself. Even if it imported with the right dates in the past version, that might have been a bug that just so happened to help in this case.

Am I correct in assuming that the time is supposed to be 11:30 ? If so have you tried changing the timezone of your calendar, the one you’re exporting from, to use UTC numbers instead of a named time zone. That might help it provide a more universally readable export. If that does not work, what about temporarily setting it to UTC 0, does it import properly into The Events Calendar then?

You might be interested in the following snippet while you are playing with this:

https://gist.github.com/elimn/13b32fb7763826df78d2

There are similar WP Engine related issues in the forums. See https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/deleted-google-calendar-events-still-showing-up/#post-1054883

I really appreciate you digging this up. But that is actually not an issue with WP Engine or even our plugin. The topic is about a user wanting events deleted from their Google Calendar to be deleted from the WP website as well. But iCal files don’t include information on deleted events, it’s an event creation not deletion format. So outside of some exotic circumstance what the users wants is just not possible and definitely not a feature of our plugin. It does not matter what server host they are using.

I have searched and asked around the team, the only topic we have ever seen with a WP Engine specific iCal issue is your last one. If you are aware of others or have confirmed with WP Engine that this is a problem with their setup please let me know. We have worked with WP Engine quite a bit in the past and like to say howdy to their team at meetups, if there is a problem here it’s something we’d like to address. I know you were seeing discrepancies between staging and live in your last topic, but there are so many other factors at play that it might still have nothing to do with WP Engine.

I appreciate your time while we zero in on this. Cheers!

– Brook

[designoneweb]

Brook,

Please see https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/import-made-duplicate-events/#post-1117976

It appears that the problem Donna and I reported on 05/18/16 is a bug in the v4.1.x release of iCal Importer. A static declaration of UTC -X is not an option for those of us in the US for the reasons stated in that thread. We are awaiting an update of the Importer that resolves this issue.

[Brook]

Thanks Design One! Cliff and I have been talking about that topic since it started. I am happy you were tracking it.

If there is anything our dev team can do, while still being fully compatible with the general iCal format, they certainly will. I’ve just added this topic to our tracker for that bug so you will be notified if a patch becomes available.

I hate to over promise here hence why I am saying “if”.. Was 9:30am (UTC-4) the correct start time in my last post? If not, it is concerning that every application we’ve tried is importing them with the “wrong time”. In the past Microsoft has done some strange things with the iCal format that no other application did, and it was not always possible to support them and all other applications as well. So we were not able to fix those incompatibilities. I really hope this is not one of those times and I kind of doubt it is, but just in case it is I don’t wish to overpromise and then ultimately underdeliver.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Support Droid]

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