Events showing as passed when they are not

[Andrew]

Hello, is there any follow-up on this please?

[Barry]

Hi Andrew – not yet. If I could ask you to be patient (we don’t guarantee same day resolution or anything like that) I’ll update you as soon as I can 🙂

[Andrew]

I am trying to be patient. I appreciate you don’t guarantee same-day resolution but this is a live site and the issue is very buggy and I’d just like to be able to sort it fast.
Thank you.

[Barry]

Sure – well, one further troubleshooting exercise that could be helpful while I wait for a chance to discuss this with other team members would be to set up a duplicate site, with only WordPress and The Events Calendar/Events Calendar PRO initially running within the same hosting environment (in a sub-directory for instance) or else in a duplicate environment.

If that’s possible, we’ll have a safe place to troubleshoot and the first step would be to see if this same problem happens on a fresh install straight away.

Assuming for the moment there are no problems, start introducing all the other components such as your theme, any other plugins and see if this problem starts occurring at some point.

On the other hand, if the problem starts up straight away that would be a clue that the problem is environmental in nature and would in itself be useful information here.

I do appreciate you want to resolve this as soon as possible – and so do we – but we do have a limited amount of support bandwidth and need to support a large number of users, so we are genuinely thankful for your patience and will do our best to work through this with you as expeditiously as possible.

[Andrew]

I’m going to recommend an alternative solution to the client. I deal with a number of excellent plugin developers, all of whom have “limited support bandwidth” (although tend to speak plain English) and who manage to actively help when there are issues. They will often issue patches right away to fix things temporarily until the updated release comes out. Every time you throw the ball back to people. In the free support forum at WordPress.org that is perhaps understandable, but not here in a premium area. Your response times are far slower than other developers, often the initial responses suggest that the ticket has not been read correctly, and it takes a long time to get you onto the issue. It is like a poorly scripted call centre where you do the bare minimum. It’s disappointing and, though I suspect you will consider the criticism unfair and not take it on board at all, having happened in the past I’ve pretty much had enough of the tribe gloss.

[Barry]

We’re genuinely sorry to hear that you feel that way and that neither The Events Calendar/Events Calendar PRO or our support for those plugins has met you’re expectations.

Nonetheless we certainly wish you all the best and hopefully the next solution you pick works out for you.

[Rob]

Hi Andrew. Thanks for the note here. Please know we do take your feedback (and any feedback like this) very seriously. I know how it feels to have a live site where problems are occurring and feeling the pressure to get that sorted as quickly as possible. It sucks, and we do feel your pain on that end. Barry & the support team do their best to help in whatever capacity we as Modern Tribe can. But we also try to set expectations early that – as a small team providing support for multiple plugins – we generally cannot provide immediate support, and require up to 24-hours between replies while we review internally and involve developers from the team as needed.

It’s worth noting that as this problem isn’t a widespread issue with the plugin, it’s tougher for us to both identify the cause and identify/provide a solution that’s going to work. This is something we’ve not seen a lot of reports on and are unable to recreate ourselves – and so while we definitely offer code snippets when we can (and do in a good number of the threads on this forum), the particular problem you’ve reported here unfortunately doesn’t have as straightforward a solution. That said, we are committed to helping you out here and remain happy to work through this with you.

I would disagree with a few of your points, namely the response time issue…as reviewing both this thread and others you posted, I see the team has gotten back to virtually every comment you’ve left within a reasonable amount of time (and often far less than 24-hours from original posting). I’m also a bit confused as to your claim that our team doesn’t “actively help when there are issues”, as I just reviewed all the threads you’ve posted since becoming a customer and saw – on the ones where you actually followed-up to the support team members’ responses – a resolution provided in almost every case.

All that said, we apologize if we let you down. It is absolutely understandable that you or your clients would want a solution with more on-demand support, and I’ll acknowledge outright that’s not us (nor is that something that would be feasible to provide for a $50 plugin). If you’re willing to work through this with us over the next couple days, we will do our best to get this sorted. But if not, best of luck finding a new solution and moving forward with your project. If you have any other feedback or suggestions for how our team could improve that you’d rather not share on the forum – please do feel free to email me directly (rob at tri.be).

[Barry]

Hi Andrew: we’ve been doing some further work on this (and I do appreciate you may no longer be interested in working with our plugins – but it may be useful for others out there, too) and I’d like to come back to a point I raised early on re caching.

I would say this could fairly be called a sporadic problem, for instance:

Andrew Okay, there is clearly no pattern here as the Pace and Narrative Drive event you linked to above was also showing as event passed previously, but now is not.

This is the sort of thing we often see where caching is an issue – simply because there can be a delay before the cache is invalidated and a freshly generated page can be shown. Now I do appreciate you stated that there is no caching solution in use but I did recall seeing an error while I browsed around your website that had clues suggesting your site is hosted by WPEngine – I’m sure you can confirm if that is the case or not.

Just be aware, that although it may be transparent to you, WPEngine does implement various caching layers and so although at this point I am not in a position to categorically say that’s the problem, it’s definitely a worthy avenue of investigation.

If you do want to take this up again then, as per Rob’s comment above (thanks Rob!), we’d be very happy to work through it with you.

Thanks!

[Andrew]

Hi guys.
@Rob, I was hoping that you would look to reach out on this one, and was really disappointed to see the thread closed on my criticism. Thanks for picking it back up.

I am with WPEngine, but am not sure if there is really a way around the caching (the caching is a cool feature they offer).

I would like to pick this back up and deal with it, absolutely. I will be back on Monday, if you can offer me any starting points on advice for this, I can then report back then.

Best wishes, Andrew.

[Rob]

Hey Andrew. Thanks for the follow-up, and for your willingness to work with us on this – closing the forum on your criticism was definitely a failing on our end, and I can see how you’d be bummed to see that (as it’s effectively shutting down discussion one doesn’t agree with). This isn’t our practice as a team and we’ve reiterated that internally just to make sure we’re all on the same page to keep it from happening down the road.

Just to keep you cued in on what we’re doing for this particular issue: we contacted WPEngine on Twitter yesterday, and they opened up additional avenues of contact based on our exchange there. Barry (who will continue driving this issue forward for you) has reached out to the WPEngine team today through their official support system and – once he’s laid the groundwork – we’ll bring our core dev team on the plugin in as well.

We suspect the problem here is that their transparent caching solution causes our template tags to dynamically display messages like “This event is passed”, especially with our pages being ‘virtual’. (This would also explain why we haven’t been able to recreate the problem locally yet). As we have seen a few variations on what is now looking to be the same source problem, fixing this would be a win for all involved: WPEngine, Modern Tribe and customers like yourself.

Based on the outcome of today’s exchange with WPEngine, Barry will keep you posted this afternoon and going into Monday. If you find things not moving at a pace you’re comfortable with or have any concerns at all, please do email me directly (rob at tri.be) so I can check on progress and keep this moving or get clarification from the team as needed.

That work for you? Let me know if not, or if there are other concerns I’ve not addressed here. Thanks again for your patience and support on this, as well as for your overall willingness to give us another shot at working through this with you.

[Andrew]

Thanks guys. Can I just say this is an awesome example of turning things around. Your honesty and direct approach to this have been such a great example (to someone trying to build his own business here) and I really appreciate it. I just made a post on Facebook as a thanks.

I am totally on board with the approach you’ve outlined, and look forward to hearing more on Monday. Thanks so much for really reaching out and being more than a little awesome here!

Cheers! AB

[Barry]

Hi Andrew.

I think there may be two issues at work here. The first is that the This event has passed is displaying when it should not and I wonder if there is an issue with the date/time settings that is causing that (perhaps they are out of synch by a few hours?).

The second is that it is not clearing promptly, though it does seem to clear eventually (and right now my hunch is that this aspect of the problem may be a caching issue – I do note that the test event created earlier in this thread now seems to display correctly).

In the first instance we are making contact with WPEngine to investigate further if caching actually is one of the issues and if so how we might resolve this.

I’ll update you again as soon as I can – and thanks again for working through this with us.

[Barry]

Hi again Andrew. So I think the next logical step here is to confirm or eliminate caching as one of the problems.

WPEngine have a feature called the Staging Area – you can read about it here. The great thing is it seems you can copy your live site into the staging area with minimal effort. This will give us a copy of your site we can safely work with and, importantly here, it is not subject to WPEngine’s caching layer:

One of WP Engines top features is our staging area. This will allow you to create a copy of your website to test out plugins and themes. The staging area operates outside of WP Engine’s caching environment.

If you’re up for copying your current site into the staging area we can take things from there, with an initial test – just like before – being the creation of a new event a few days in the future. We can then see if it falls prey to the same problem as on your live site (or not).

Thanks!

[Andrew]

Hi Barry.

Thanks for this. I use the staging area with WPEngine regularly, and in fact I used it to try to setup your plugin originally, to test it on the site. It didn’t work (I had this events passed issue, you can see it on the staging site here: http://nicolamorgan.staging.wpengine.com/venue/pulp-fiction-bookshop/ ) but I wanted to try it on the live site too, in case it was just an issue with the staging area.

I will try to setup a new staging area, and give you access if you like? Then you can look around. Would that help?

[Barry]

Cheers Andrew:

So long as you are happy for us to do some troubleshooting in the staging area then it would be much appreciated if you could send across (S)FTP access details and an admin login for WordPress, plus anything else you think might be handy for us (a control panel login for instance if that facilitates access to a tool like phpMyAdmin, or else SSH details to allow our dev to access the database by other means). Please send any credentials to [email protected], marking the email FAO Barry/Paul and linking back to this thread.

Our plan is for one of our devs, Paul, to take this on and he will run through the troubleshooting process – it may be he posts here to ask some questions before he actually does anything on the test site.

Last but not least, we would also be pleased to offer you access to our 3.0 beta code in case you wanted to try that out and perhaps see if that even resolves the problem for you. If you’re interested in this (and also if you have any further concerns or wish to discuss any aspects of the issue privately) please don’t hesitate to contact Rob at [email protected] and he will be happy to help.

Thanks once again for your patience and support 🙂

[Author]

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