Facebook events importing duplicates

[Doug]

I’m aware that this has been addressed in the forums here without resolution – so I wanted to ping it again to see where the Tri.be is at the moment on solving this issue.

We are telling lots of organizations that we can auto-import their events from Facebook and it’s a good thing – people are making use of our calendar because of this time savings.

But all of the FB auto-imports are being duplicated and worse, it’s dragging in new copies of the images as well. My backups are getting bigger fast.

We’re using the Headway Theme (customized) and are up to date on WP as well. Some of our plugins are customized as well – so I’ve deactivated the ones I can and the problem persists.

Hope there’s some progress!

In the short term, I’m setting the default status to pending review on all events and will try to keep an eye on what’s coming in.

Thanks for any help that you can provide!
-doug

[Nico]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for reaching out on this, and sorry to hear about this issue 🙁

Searching the backlog I could find the bug report for this, but I see this paused until we can have further confirmation from customers. It seems that most of the times this was caused by some kind of plugin/theme conflict. This might be a good opportunity to re-open the issue!

Given the nature of this issue the suggested workflow to continue here is:

– Test for this in a staging site with default conditions: TweentyFifteen WordPress Theme and no other plugins active but ours.
– If you notice the duplication happening there as well, you’ll need to share a database dump so someone in the dev team can take a look at it.

Do you think you can manage to set this up? If your hosting comes packed with cPanel (or similar software) setting a WordPress install might be fairly simple as 1-click installs are provided.

Please let me know what you think about this,
Best,
Nico

[Damien]

I would be very interested to read the fix for this as I am getting the same problem here.

I am using the Divi theme and I am getting the same event image duplicated up to 15 times.

Is there a way that when the event is expired it would auto delete the associated image? (or in this case images). This way even if the multiple image things keeps happening they wont stay in the media folder filling up the available memory.

Aside from that I love this plugin
Cheers
DJ

[Nico]

Hey Dj,

Thanks for jumping in here, and glad to hear you are loving the plugin 🙂

For now I’m just waiting for @Doug to confirm is he can set up the “clean test site” to reproduce this.

Unfortunately I can’t see an easy way of doing what you describe regarding the image duplication. There’s a filter to prevent image import from Facebook, I don’t think this is what you are looking for, but take a look at Brook’s reply to this thread: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/do-not-import-images/#dl_post-87565

Best,
Nico

[Doug]

Hi guys – unfortunately it’s not easy for me to set up another website to test this issue. Do you have a list of potential plugin conflicts that I might use as a guide?

[Nico]

Hey Doug,

Thanks for following up on this! Sorry to hear about that Doug. Look into the original bug report there are no theme/plugin patterns about where this might be coming from.

@DJ, do you think you can set up a test site for this? If any of you guys has cPanel (or similar software) on your hosting provider, there might be the option to create a 1-click WordPress install which comes in handy for setting up this test site.

Please let me know if you can do so @DJ,
Thanks,
Nico

[Damien]

I have a multi site setup so I could do that however before I do I am going to try a few tests with the current environment.

Test #1
To tick or not to tick.

I have been setting up the id’s etc in the settings page, then choosing Auto import events, and then going to the facebook import page in TEC and ticking the boxes of all the events and triggering the import function to get an immediate population of events.

I started to wonder if I just leave the auto import on (set to import every hour) if TEC might import these events without them being ticked (as that is what happen after that with new events placed in facebook) and then stop duplicating them…..

I will let you know in an hour how that’s going

[Damien]

Test #1 Update

Ok the news so far is… TEC will auto import events without them being ticked if the “auto import” feature in the settings page has been ticked. It will happen one hour or one day or one week (depending on the option you set in the settings page) after you set it up. (At the moment there are no duplications)

So now we move on to test #2
Which event (if any) will duplicate…

My assumption is that one hour from now when TEC does it’s next check for new events in facebook it will duplicate the 1st event.

I will let you know in an hour

Cheers Y’all

[Damien]

Update on test #2

Ok after over an hour still no duplications….I am going to leave this over night to see what happens.

Test #3 will be inserting a new event dated before the 1st current event and see what that does. As I said in an early post here I have had up to 15 event and image duplications in the past appear in my media folder all dated the same with the same FB id.. So I really want to trigger the error so we can all know how to avoid it down the track.

Cheers Y’all
DJ

[Nico]

Hey Dj,

Thanks a lot for the heads-up on this… Keep me posted on your findings please!

Best,
Nico

[Damien]

test #2 Update

Ok still no duplications after a day….

On to Test #3
Inserting an event before the first current one…

Let you know in an hour

[Damien]

One hour later still no duplicates

Test #4 edit an event

Ok so I will move onto the next step an edit an existing event….So far the fault has not happened again and the only variable is that I didn’t tick the boxes & trigger an immediate population of events on the import facebook page of TEC….Maybe that is the key???

Anyway back in hour

[Damien]

Update on test #4

Test #4 did not trigger the error.

Test #5 Delete the event
I’m going to delete the last event I placed

See you in an hour

[Damien]

Test #5 did not trigger the error??

I’m running out of ideas….maybe the key is as I said before do not trigger the 1st import if you have selected the auto import function.

So I have two tests left… #6 enter an event in FB with no end date and #7 delete all the events and start again with triggering the auto import.

So here is test #6 Event with no end date…

See you soon

[Damien]

Ok Test #6 did not trigger the error in fact TEC auto creates an end date if you don’t put one in.

Last test before I give up is to repeat the only variable I have been avoiding and that is to tick all the events and trigger the facebook pull.

Here we go…

[Author]

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