Facebook events importing duplicates

[Keith]

This is how the number in the events of database has grown throughout the day. Of the new events, only half a dozen or so are genuinely new events.

There are 7 duplicates (actually, at this point, 7 sets of octuplets). They are re-added to the database on each import. The 7 source Facebook events have each been modified on Facebook.

So, in this test, we can say that every event that has caused duplicates has had a Facebook modification. Whether or not there are events on Facebook that have been modified but haven’t caused duplicates, I don’t know.

[Nico]

Hi Douglas, Keith and Lourene,

Thanks for jumping in here! Sorry you are all being affected by this. I’ll raise the flag on this issue and will make sure the team is aware of it. I’ll try to reproduce this myself as it’s obvious that some kind of bug is affecting the auto-import feature. I’ll follow your recommendations…

• @Douglas, thanks for jumping and sharing your comments here. Also thank you for helping @Lourene out!
• @Keith, @Douglas mentioned he sees the duplicates when importing with the ‘pending’, is this true in your case as well? Also thanks for sharing the Pages names with me, I’ll surely use them in my test site.
• @Lourene: not sure if your problem relates directly to the duplicates issue or is it a performance limitation specifically. You are welcome to follow-along here, but you can also open up a new thread for this performance. When creating the new thread please be sure to Test for conflicts and include you system information, that will surely help getting a better reply. If you do please include a link back t this thread where I’ll try to help you all with the duplication issue.

Thanks you folks for your patience while we figure this out,
Best,
Nico

[Keith]

Hi Nico,

I was importing directly to the published status.

The list of pages I gave you is not currently creating new duplicates. The date of those events that were duplicated has passed. However, if you set the system clock of your test system back to the morning of October 25 (CET), I think you should be able to reproduce exactly what I saw.

Regards,
Keith

[Eric Unkauf]

Nico,
Thanks for your help. I only mentioned the issue we run into when putting all of the pages in because this is what caused us to stop automating event imports, I created a separate thread for this several weeks ago when the problem originally came up.

When we stopped automating imports, we no longer had events getting duplicated. For us the two unrelated problems are linked in that it is a question of which we prefer to deal with.

Someone else mentioned that they thought events being duplicated was the result of the FB event being updated, I don’t think that is the problem. One of the pages we import from we also manage; we tried updating a couple of the events to see what would happen. These did not duplicate even when we automated things, BUT another page we import from had three out of five event from their FB page duplicate even though they didn’t updated any of them.

[Nico]

Thanks for following up folks! I’ve set a testing site for this. From all your comments the only common factor seems to be that the duplicates appear with auto-import, the rest of the config seems to be pretty random.

So I’ll leave the importer running for a couple of hours to see what happens. If I’m not able to reproduce this issue then I’ll try each scenario (edit events on facebook, import to pending, etc).

Thanks for your patience on this,
Best,
Nico

[Keith]

Hi Nico,

Just wondering if you managed to replicate the problem.

Cheers,
Keith

[Nico]

Hey Keith (and everyone here),

Sorry for the delay, I’ve been checking this last week but couldn’t find any duplicates, so I decided to let it run for a week more. Re-checking today I’m still not seeing any duplicates on my install 🙁

Anyway, the feedback you all shared is sufficient evidence to prove there’s something odd happening with duplicates and auto import. I’ve re-opened the original bug reported and noted the new information that you shared and my own findings. As our new release is almost out this will not be included in it. But it’s initially targeted for a maintenance release.

I’m sorry not to have a better answer right now, but this is definitively not an easy issue to work on (because we cannot reproduce it, and also because the conditions in which this happens doesn’t follow a pattern). I appreciate your patience while we work on this issue. I’ll leave this topic open for now, so if you have some new information to share you can do so here.

Thanks,
Nico

[Keith]

Hi Nico,

I think you should be able to reproduce the error by using the pages I gave you and setting your system clock back to the morning of October 25 (CET). That way you would have exactly the same set-up I had. If it doesn’t work I can try to set up a system for you, if you’d like.

Cheers,
Keith

[Douglas]

Nico, what interval are you testing the auto importing? I believe most of us are using the hourly.

Side Note:

The Facebook import is the primary purpose that I chose TEC. I have invested over 300.00 a year in licensing, as well of hours of my time. I personally am running a business and marketing a product and an experience. This issue thread has been open since 10/14/15 and today on 11/05/15 there is no potential solution in site. As well, if I understand you correctly, we may not see any fix until after 4.0 is released and the bug verified to still be there.

I personally run with almost 700 events in my active database. This has a significant personal time and monetary impact on me and my business. I think we can all agree that the purpose of TEC, is to provide your customers with a tool that saves time, effort and cost in providing services to thier customers.

I think we can all agree, that, that is not what is happening in regards to the FaceBook plugin while this problem exists in the automated import engine.

What can we do to help resolve this issue and stop our bleeding?

[Nico]

Hey Douglas,

what interval are you testing the auto importing? I believe most of us are using the hourly.

Hourly as well !

Regarding your note, I really feel you there and completely understand the frustration when things doesn’t work as expected. On my side I’m truly doing all I can to find a solution for this issue (I’ll be setting a new test site on a different environment to continue to try and reproduce this). I’ve also reached out to our product manager on this and a developer will be assigned to set up new tests to catch this issue as well, the thing is that until we can reproduce and define a scenario where this fails consistently it’s hard to craft a fix 🙁

@Douglas if you are up to creating a test site in a staging server with default conditions (Default WordPress theme, The Event Calendar + Facebook Importer + PRO -or not-) that colud be a great source of information. If you do so and find a way to reproduce this (maybe setting imported events as ‘pending’ as you stated above) then I will ask you for instructions + db export so one of our devs can take a deeper close into that evidence.

Thanks again every for your patience with this issue, and I truly hope we can solve this soon,
Best,
Nico

[Keith]

Hi Nico,

I have a test system that is currently creating duplicates, strangely it’s creating duplicates for past events. You’re welcome to log-in and investigate. It’s a test system and I have a backup, so no damage can be done.

Regards,
Keith

• This reply was modified 10 years, 5 months ago by Keith.

[Nico]

Hey Keith,

Thanks for confirming this and glad to see we are getting some evidence on a test site!

Can you please send me the details on a private reply? I guess the dev team will be interested in taking a look into the database, if you could send a db dump by email to support at this domain I’d appreciate.

Thanks again for going the extra mile with these tests,
Best,
Nico

[Keith]

Hi Nico,

It hasn’t produced any duplicates for about 12 hours. I’ll keep any eye on it and upload the details and a dump here if it starts again.

Just one thing to mention, that I’m sure you’re aware of: if you have a test system set up to import every hour, the imports won’t actually run unless you access the site once an hour. The way WP Cron works is that it will only check the job queue when somebody accesses the site. So if nobody access the site for, say, 8 hours, then no imports will run during 8 hours.

Cheers,
Keith

[Mark]

I am having the same problem with this site. I initially did a manual import of events from Facebook and then switched them to auto so thought that might have caused the duplicates. I then deleted all events and waited for Facebook to import them for the first time and set it to hourly updates. However, this still resulted in duplicate events. My client is anxious to get this sorted as am I so would love to know of any possible solutions.

[Nico]

Hey Keith,

Thanks for keeping me posted! Don’t worry about that my test site is surely full of events so the imports are running 🙂

@Mark, I’m sorry for the hassle with duplicates. I guess the safest procedure for know would be to import events manually. I’m aware this implies more manual work our plugin is intended to solve, but we are still investigating this issue that surely is not simple at all to resolve.

As a heads up on this, a developer in the team started working on adding new tests/checks for duplicates and hopefully those will help uncover what’s causing this soon!

Thanks again everyone for the patience on this,
Best,
Nico

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