Feed issues

[inikosoft]

For some strange reason, our event category feeds are taking any event that starts at 5:00pm and giving them a date of the next day as well as making them appear as an all day event. If I change the start time to 5:05pm it fixes and the feed displays the correct time and day for the event but if I make it 5:00pm again, it updates and shows the event as the following day and is showing as “all day”.

This is only happening on the feeds themselves, which is messing with the feeds we have set up for an ical feed. If you look at the event on the site it says 5:00pm in the list view, in calendar view, in the event details itself… pretty much everywhere except in the feed for any category or even all events, it’s incorrect there and makes this adjustment. Below is the example of what I’m talking about.

This just started happening and I’ve went through and updated the plugin which didn’t fix the issue. I’m thinking it’s possibly a glitch between the plugin and a recent WP update? I re-installed WordPress and that didn’t fix the issue either. Please help!

Event that starts at 5:00pm on September 11th: https://kehillah.org/calendar/jv-volleyball-match-vs-basis-silicon-valley/

Feed for this category: https://kehillah.org/calendar/category/athletics/girls-jv-volleyball/feed/
– If you do a search for “JV VOLLEYBALL MATCH VS. BASIS OF SILICON VALLEY” you’ll see this event shows it’s on the 12th (the next day) and is marking it as all day with the timestamp.

** All caches have been cleared and I even tried deleting the event and re-adding it, no luck. We have not updated the theme and it was working before. The only thing that has updated since it stopped working is WordPress itself. This site is on wpengine so it automatically keeps WordPress itself up to date.

[Barry]

Hi AnnMarie,

The publication date in RSS feeds is expressed in the UTC timezone by convention. Based on your system information, it looks like your site operates in UTC-7 and so what you are seeing there is simply 5pm in your local timezone adjusted for UTC.

Does that clarify things at all?

[inikosoft]

Hello Barry,
I don’t think you are quite understanding the issue. We aren’t having any problems with timezone adjustments and dates, everything is working great EXCEPT if we mark an event to start at 5pm. If we mark an event to start at 5:00pm and give it any end time, it goes into the RSS feed as the next day marked as an all day event (but still shows correctly on the actual site and in the calendars showing events). If I change the time to 5:01 or 5:05, it shows correctly in the feed as well but once I change it back to 5pm, it changes in the RSS feed as an all day event the next day again. There is something going wrong with ONLY 5pm being marked as the start time. That is when they show in the RSS feed incorrectly.

[Barry]

Hmm. Unfortunately, even with your further note, I’m still not fully understanding. Here’s an extract from the RSS feed you shared:

https://gist.github.com/barryhughes/6dbc082f16b310241fa375d8542f37dc

The first item relates to this event taking place at 4pm on September 7th. In the RSS feed, this shows as the same day (but 11pm at night) – so the same transformation.

The second item is this event, taking place at 5pm on September 11th. As noted before, in the RSS feed it shows as midnight (00:00) the next day. Nowhere though do I see anything in the RSS data suggesting that it is an all day event.

Where are you seeing the reference to it being an all day event? Is there a specific app or tool that you are using to read the feed that interprets it in this way?

[inikosoft]

Oh, sorry, I should have mentioned that we are converting the RSS feed to an ical feed. This is the feed that is importing the events to mobile calendars… http://feed2ical.appspot.com/convert?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkehillah.org%2Fcalendar%2Fcategory%2Fathletics%2Fgirls-varsity-volleyball%2Ffeed%2F

Again, there are no time and date issues unless the start time is set to 5pm. If we change it to 5:01, everything displays correctly. I can’t figure out why this issue is only happening for events starting at exactly 5:00pm.

[Barry]

OK … my assumption would be that the tool you are using interprets feed items with a publication time of midnight as being “all day”, which of course isn’t necessarily the case.

Something you could try is setting your WordPress timezone to a geographical value such as “America/Vancouver” (and not a numeric GMT or UTC offset): assuming you are not actually located in the UK or any place that basically uses UTC-0 time, I think this will result in the event date/time in the RSS feed being expressed in that timezone.

Perhaps that would provide an easy workaround? You could also check in with the operator of the tool you’re using and see if they have any insights to offer since, best I can tell, there’s nothing fundamentally broken in terms of the RSS output – it’s more an issue with how that tool interprets and processes it.

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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