Facebook Auto-Importing multiple copies of events, venues & Organizers

[bernhardprange]

Dear Brook,
thanks for the setup. Feel free to test whatever you like on the installation I set up. If you need error logs or anything else… let me know. I want to get this working properly.

By expired ID’s I mean Facebook Groups, Sites, Persons who are deleted. The list you got in the thread here is the list of relevant ID’s related to party-events in a town. So this list is growing constantly and has poor monitoring of what’s going offline.

Seeing the messages caused by this ID’s I am wondering if that might cause the problem. Especially since the bug seems not to be wide-spreaded on the forum, I am suspecting this to be the problem. Is there a way for your dev-guys to first approve the ID and only if valid to pull information?

I’ll now go through the list manually (once again) remove invalid ID’s and make a new import with that. Maybe the problems stops. If so – the above mentioned function would be mandatory for the plugin. A manual research (on mistake) is not really an option for a productive enviroment. 😉

[bernhardprange]

Hey Brook,
after reimporting the Events manually I have the bug directly. The organizer where it happens is the “Lolita Bar” / “Lolita Café” Please check it out.

Both locations are active on Facebook.

[bernhardprange]

Hi Brook,
lately I had initially more than one venue & organzier specifically on this id: 212434094374
Please have a closer look.

BR

Bernhard

[Brook]

Thanks for the extra info. That is definitely a help.

I’ll now go through the list manually (once again) remove invalid ID’s and make a new import with that. Maybe the problems stops. If so – the above mentioned function would be mandatory for the plugin. A manual research (on mistake) is not really an option for a productive enviroment.

I definitely agree. There should be need to manually delete IDs that are expired. And if  expired ones are causing problem, we definitely want to fix that. I will be keep an eye out for those IDs and seeing if I see a problem as well.

I would mention though on the other hand, for performance reasons it might make sense for you to comb through the list every now and again (like you just did) to remove any that no longer work. As that will increase the performance of your imports. Not that this is necessary, just not a bad habit to make.

I did get one event that appears to be a duplicate. I found a bunch others that at first appeared to be duplicates, but the Facebook group actually had multiple events with the same name. So it was not importing wrong, it was just importing all of them duplicates that existed on Facebook once each.

I am currently further investigating that one that actually seems to be a duplicate.

– Brook

[bernhardprange]

Please have a special close look on 212434094374.
This one was importing multiple venues and organizers.

[Brook]

I will retest that one specifically. Thanks for reporting back on that, that probably helped narrow down the problem. I will have to do the test late tomorrow as I am out most of the day. Ordinarily we pass our threads to a fellow staff member for the day if we are gone, but in this case since it requires back story and a while to get setup for testing I can not do that. I will let you know what happens tomorrow night. Until then, cheers!

– Brook

[Tracey]

Having the same problem its duplicating events like 23 times and this started to happen when I asked to merge duplicates. Have we found a fix?

[bernhardprange]

Nice not to be alone! 😀

[Brook]

Howdy Tracey,

Thanks for reporting in. Could you post a private reply containing your system information? That would be an enormous help. No solutions yet. Unfortunately this has been a long investigation, but I feel like we are getting really close. Your system information could be the exact ticket we need to isolate and fix.

– Brook

 

[Richard]

Same problem here, random events get imported, like, a dozen times. I got 22 FB page IDs in the import list. WordPress 4.1.1 running a Themify theme on a Linux server, CGI/FastCGI, PHP Version 5.3.28, MySQL 5.5.40

[bernhardprange]

As I removed a couple of Page and Group IDs from the importlist it seems not to happen anymore. I’m taking a bet ID verification. Propably is the import-error management poor at the moment.

[Brook]

That is what I have been focusing on too Bernhard. It has been a difficult thing to test though, because I have been traveling this past week and so I am testing on my laptop, a laptop that I am not able to keep constantly on. This interferes with WP_Cron, which is what activates the process to auto import… Basically it just slows down testing dramatically. I will no longer have this problem on Tuesday, once I am back with a permanently online server I can test on. But, I would like to find a resolution before then if at all possible. One thing that would really help, is if anyone else experiencing this problem is able to to post their System Information. This can be found by visiting Events > Settings > Help, and scrolling down to the System Information box. Copy/paste everything there into a private reply here, so that it is not visible to the public. If you are not able to do this I completely understand, but if you can it would be much appreciated. I will keep testing and isolating regardless, but with extra information will come a faster fix.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Brook]

Howdy again,

I am not seeing this issue either Bernhard when I remove any invalid events from the importer. Which is great because that is a solution for now. I will get this reported though for our devs to fix, and then we can include that fix in an updated version of our calendar.

If anyone else is experiencing this issue, here are the steps to fix it:

1. Go to WP Admin > Events > Import: Facebook
2. Make a not of any Facebook Group/Page which has an error message.
3. Remove each of those Facebook Group/Pages from your auto import settings in WP Admin > Events > Settings > Facebook

I really appreciate your sticking with us Bernhard. You helped us find a particularly wily bug and our support team wants to again say thank you. Please let me know if you have any further questions. I am adding this topic to our bug tracker, so you will be notified when a fix is included with an upcoming release of the plugin.

Cheers!

– Brook

[bernhardprange]

This reply is private.

[Brook]

This reply is private.

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