Facebook events importing duplicates

[Nico]

Hey Dj,

Thanks for keep me posted on this… Just wanted to let you know I’m following here, let’s see how the last test goes!

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???

At this point just testing this out will lead us to an answer 🙂 Is this what test #7 is about?

Cheers,
Nico

[Damien]

Ok we have an error!

This is not the error I was hoping to see but an error none the less….This time all the images did not import at all, I just have blank squares. This is the first time I have seen this happen????

Still no duplications….hmmmm

[Damien]

I just did another import and all images made it across this time…

So sorry to anyone following this so far I have not been able to trigger the error again.

In the last test I ticked the boxes and triggered an immediate import.

It’s worth pointing out that I am using the same set of plugins on the test site that I had on others when the fault occurred.

I will have to leave it there for the moment and I will let you know if it starts happening again.

Dj

[Nico]

Well Dj,

First of all thank you very much for testing this out! You have done an amazing work here 🙂

So the only difference between the test site and the live site is the theme? Can activate the theme and then check if the auto-import generate duplicates? That way we could narrow this down to the theme (or be mostly sure about it).

I guess the blank images error might be a temporary glitch and not a bug itself?

Thanks once again,
Nico

[Damien]

Cheers Nico

I was using the same theme “Divi by ET” and the same set of plugins…. I was happy to do the tests but i’m not happy I couldn’t trigger the fault??

Anyway now that I have tried a combination of possibilities if it does happen again I will be that much closer to finding the problem.

Cheers
Dj

[Douglas]

My research on this issue has determined it to be when you are auto importing to a pending status. As soon as you publish the event it will stop importing..

Suspect the code is is only checking for published events when checking already imported.

[Douglas]

A secondary issue that I have found is that when you do the manual import they have changed to using the end date instead of the beginning date. as a result anything that has an after midnight end time and already occurred and was published would get listed as importable again.

[Keith]

I’m having this problem, too. I’m seeing many duplicates on the site I’m setting up. As a test, I set up a new clean twentyfifteen site, and added the same pages to be imported. Although the new site is seeing some duplicates, it’s not seeing as many as the original site.

I think one cause is the Facebook page owner updating the event on Facebook. This event, for example was updated. It has two posts, and appears twice in the calendar. The Facebook page says that the photo was updated, but it looks like they also changed the title. Because the title has changed, the two events each have their own slug. On the other site, most of the duplicates have not had a title change, so their slugs have a “-2” appended like this:

event/actuacion-de-el-showmancero
event/actuacion-de-el-showmancero-2

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Keith.

[Keith]

I’ve set the auto-import to one hour, and I seem to be getting more duplicates on each iteration. I’ll post the list of pages I’m importing. You should be able to replicate the problem on a clean install of WP twentyfifteen.

[Keith]

This reply is private.

[Keith]

I seem to be getting more duplicates on the twentyfifteen site, than I have on the other site. The event that was duplicated with two different slugs, is now being duplicated on each import. Each of the duplicated events is itself being duplicated.

For some reason, the events that are being duplicated are not being ticked in the Import Events Page, even after being imported multiple times. I don’t know if that’s a symptom of the problem, or something to do with the cause of it.

[Eric Unkauf]

So…as much as we like this plugin, it does seem like there are some bugs with the facebook importer. We have 39 pages we import from right now, there are another 30 that we should have. If we have this automated, we can only have 5 or 8 pages listed before we lose access the Events: Import: Facebook tab on the back end. If we have more pages then that set for automatic import, we get error messages when trying to access the Facebook Import page and cannot get on that page until we bring down the number of pages it is set to import from.

Yesterday we tried going from only having five pages at a time to all 39 again, over night we ended up with 32 events that imported in duplicate.

We are using the Avada theme, it is my understanding that this theme does not conflict with the plugin. We also deactivated all other plugins and still had both of these issues occur, doesn’t that mean the problem is with the plugin?

[Douglas]

Louren, the tabs on the back end as you suggest are do to the amount of processing. It is actually the settings on your server. PHP Has default settings that are small for time out on requests.

If you google “gateway timeout 502”, you will find lots of information about which settings you need to adjust for what ever type of server you are using.

[Eric Unkauf]

Douglas, thank you for the quick response. We tried that a month or so ago when that started being an issue but then everything on the site went wonky, we reverted back to the previous settings while looking at our options. But…that shouldn’t cause multiple instances of each event when we have all of the pages in. We tried several other options and honestly prefer this plugin. If necessary I can keep going through every day or two to manually have it check small groups of pages, but it would be great if I could have it check the pages all of the pages without having to do anything (including going back and deleting duplicates).

[Douglas]

That is what I am doing until this bug is resolved. Manual import is working for me.

I was referring earlier to the tabs you were not able to open in the event calendar admin area.

Make sure that that you the latest of all of the event calendar plugins as well. There was a fix in the main plugin that helped with the timming out as well.

[Author]

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