Facebook Events No Longer Importing/Times Incorrect

[agruden]

Behavior started a couple of days ago – figures we just launched our site and people are listing on our Business Directory. The Facebook imports were coming in with a time shift. Realized we had the incorrect time and adjusted to -5UTC — and waited for overnight update. They imported with 1 hour error.
Checked forums and changed to New York site. And switched to hourly to see if I could test. No imports.

Tried to manual import of the events. WHOA – that did not work as there was a 10 hour shift (they arrived with a time stamp that was 10 hours earlier than the event on FB). Deleted them. Turned off all plug-ins, switched to basic template. Changed to Daily import. Turned on all my plug-ins and template again. Waited overnight. No imports.

Tested a manual import again – still a 10 hour earlier shift on the manual import.
I can live with daily updates, but not sure what else I can test or what else I can look at. Happy to provide credentials to take a look.

Thank you! Ann

We are using Events Calendar Pro (free non-profit license – thank you!)
Facebook Events purchased.

[Julie Kuehl]

Hello agruden,

Thank you for your thorough explanation of the issue! Before we take the step of digging into your site, can you provide me with a link to an event or two that you are trying to import? I’d like to try to replicate the imports first.

— Julie

[agruden]

Hmm – so sorry – I thought I posted a reply.. must not have “taken.” Anyway – here are two of the facebook events. They are published, but I did them manually with a couple of minor edits to be sure I saw the difference.
https://www.facebook.com/events/703577889661553/
https://www.facebook.com/events/245524008947762/

[Julie Kuehl]

Hi agruden,

 

No worries. Thanks for those links. I tried importing them on my testing site and they didn’t have the major time shift that you reported, but there was some wonkiness. I’m going to look a little deeper and get back to you.

 

— Julie

[Julie Kuehl]

Hi again,

It’s importing as expected on my local install. I missed that it’s actually a two day event on Facebook. So now we need to figure out why it’s not working on your setup. Have you tried deleting the events and re-importing them after setting it to a daily import?

— Julie

[agruden]

Hi Julie — Yes – I’ve tried that. But it actually is not importing at all – nothing. Not even if I disable the plug-in and re-enable it.

When it was working I had a one hour time shift.

Now the only way I can get an event in is to manually import it and I still have the 10 hour time shift.

So it is essentially – broken.

The events showing on my site at the moment have been entered the good old fashioned way – by hand.

What I have not tried is to remove the plug in and to reinstall it. Should I do that? And if I do, my only question would be does the FB key and secret remain the same or do I remove it on FB and start all over again… I have about 5 or 6 organizations – but at this point it isn’t working so haven’t added any others.

Thank you.

Ann

[Julie Kuehl]

Hi agruden,

You’ve really got the team stumped on this one. It seems to be working fine for us (and three of us have tested it now), but can I ask where you are importing from? I mean, there are actually two places that you can import Facebook events from using the plugin.
• The first is under Events > Import: Facebook, where usually it’s a one-time, per-event import and you would enter an event ID such as 703577889661553.
• The other is under Events > Settings > Facebook, where you would enter the name of the group such as FerretAssociationOfConnecticut.
Which of those have you been using?

But to dig deeper, let’s go back and verify that you’ve disabled all the other plugins and reverted back to the Twenty Twelve theme and are using a non-UTC time zone. No difference?

(This is where I caution to make a backup of your site.)

If that didn’t work, take note of your Facebook App ID and App secret and then let’s deactivate and delete the Facebook Importer plugin and re-download it from the website here (you can find it and your license key under Account Central in the top right menu) just in case it’s corrupted. Then re-install it and enter the organization name on the Events > Settings > Facebook page and be sure the interval is set to Daily. Save that and then you should be able to go to Events > Import: Facebook and check the boxes there to bring in the events immediately.

Does that make sense? Let me know what happens.

— Julie

[agruden]

Hi Julie – made perfect sense and tried it all and a few other things this morning. Still not working… Here’s what I did.

First, I do have several organizations listed under Events>Settings>Facebook — those are the ones that are no longer importing including FerretAssocationofConnecticut

I have been using the Events>Import:Facebook to test and actually I do not have to enter the id — it automatically goes out and seems to identify the events on facebook with little check-marks in front. I’ve clicked those and that is what is being imported with the 10 hour time shift. I am not entering an event id. However, I just tested it using the event ID rather than the check box and it does the same thing – brings it in with a 10 hour time shift. And yes, I shut off all plug-ins other than Events, Events Pro and Events – Facebook.

Then I did the uninstall and reinstall of the Facebook Events. Now the odd thing is that I did not have to re-enter any information regarding my license or Facebook App ID or App Secret or any of the organizations. Everything including all the settings were pre-filled.

I tried deleting, reactivating twice. Second time I tried, before reinstalling, going into Events-Calendar and making a couple of changes and “saving” them hoping to overwrite any settings that might be holding over previous data from the Facebook application. Did not matter. It still reapplied all my previous settings – so that may help narrow down where the issue lies.

Again – we have 2 problems – the incorrect time when it imports manually and no automatic importing at all – and it seemed when it did, I had a 1 hour time shift – but can’t test that at this point as that functionality is not working.
Thanks,
Ann

[Julie Kuehl]

Hi agruden,

The time difference seems to to something specific to your setup. We can’t seem to replicate it here. The three places to check for timezone differences would be the WordPress settings (which I believe you did), the computer settings (which aren’t likely to be the culprit), and the server settings. Have you looked at the server settings by chance? Other than that, I really don’t know what could be causing the issue.

As far as the importing issue goes, have you tried importing any fresh Facebook events? I mean it seems we keep trying to import the same ones and maybe there’s just some bad stuff lying about specific to those events. Can you create another event or just try to import from some other Facebook page to see if you have the same problems with those? Have any new events been added to the FerretAssocationofConnecticut calendar since we’ve started working on this? Just looking for some fresh event data to test.

— Julie

[agruden]

Hi Julie –
I added a new event and imported that. Same behavior. 10 hour shift ahead. 🙁 PC is fine. As for the server, I’m hosted with Godaddy, so can’t imagine that is the issue.
At this point I think it makes more sense to back up a bit.
I am rather more concerned that I can’t do a fresh installation and try to get my auto-import working again.
As I indicated, nothing is importing at all. No new events or new organization events are being added. Nothing. They show up in the list ready to import, but they do not auto-import….
Also as I indicated, when I totally removed FB events, and reinstalled, I did NOT have to populate any information – everything was still there from before – so it really never uninstalled if all the settings remained. Files may have uninstalled, but settings are what drive those files and clearly that is what is corrupted.
This had been working fine. It was when I was alerted to a 1 hour time shift in the events for Ferret Assn of CT that I went to trouble shoot it by reading the forums and changing the time zone to UTC-5; and then to NYC. That’s then when I tried changing to a twice-daily and then hourly auto-import in an effort to see if the correction repaired the problem that everything went hay-wire. Then I proceeded to manually import and the 10 hour earlier time stamp was showing up. If I recall for 1 or 2 days, the auto-import worked with a 1 hour shift, while the manual import had the 10 hour shift. Then the auto-shift stopped working completely. Maybe when I went to NYC? can’t recall now (will change back and see what happens overnight tonight – can’t hurt at this point).
I can live without manually importing events. I cannot live without auto-importing events for my organizations. Even if it’s 1 hour off on the time, I’ll move my time zone to make it work. It’s a rotten work-a-round, but I’ll do it.
But to even try to do that, I have to be able to COMPLETELY wipe out the FB events package. Now how do I do that? Does it also mean I have to remove the app from FB as well? And then go through the entire process all over again?
Thank you.
Ann

[agruden]

Julie – Well – it did import the new event with the setting changed to daily; UTC-5 (rather than NYC). HOWEVER, the event came in 2 hours later than scheduled… LOL so instead of running from noon to 4 pm it is showing as running from 2 pm to 6 pm.

Soooooooooooooo — should I move to Greenland or Phoenix? UTC-3 or UTC-7 to get it to work correctly?

Though I still would like to start fresh if you can give me instructions for that.

Thank you.

Ann

[Julie Kuehl]

Hey Ann,

Greenland or Phoenix? Seriously? I’m mean it’s February in the Northern Hemisphere. I know which one I’d pick. 😉

OK, completely wiping out all the detritus from the Facebook Importer is likely to get dicey and deep. So let’s try a different approach. Set your Facebook keys to a string of zeros (e.g., 000000000000000) and save that. Then deactivate/delete/reinstall the plugin. You may want to also delete the events that are troublesome too at this point. Then verify that the time zone is set correctly and reinstall the plugins and set the auto import again. And we’ll see what happens.

And you know, after staring at this thread for far too long, I’m now wondering if there isn’t a bigger issue with the auto importing going on. I’m going to verify an auto import on my end and see what happens here too.

One more question. If you manually enter an event, and not import it from Facebook, is the time as expected? Dumb question perhaps, but trying to cover all the bases.

— Julie

[agruden]

Hi Julie – will try this later today. But I can verify that one event that had been manually input seems to be perfectly fine and is holding the time perfectly even with the changes to the time in settings. So that does not seem to be affecting it.

Will report back tomorrow what happens overnight.

Thank you,

Ann

[Julie Kuehl]

Hello agruden,

Cool. Let’s hope that does the trick.

– Julie

[agruden]

Hello Julie – OK – went through everything using New York City for location rather than the UTC+5 … and will see what happens by morning.

Ann

[Author]

Posts