Hundreds of events created for each day of recurring event – how can I delete

[Jeff Rose]

There are now 21,500 events even though there typically are only about 2 dozen events/month and the settings are for 12 months in the past and 12 months in the future.

Deleting these manually (even with bulk deletes) takes a long time and often results in 404 errors.

[Jeff Rose]

It is possible that the new release fixed the issue going forward but I’d like to delete the extra events that seem to be slowing down the site and causing errors to be generated (mostly 404s) when I try to delete them – or even try to view a list of the events.

I couldn’t find a way to delete them with a mass delete plug-in (I tried WP Mass Delete) or using php Admin of the WebCalendar Database.

Is a full restore of the website the only way to recover from this?

[George]

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for reaching out.

I’m sorry to hear about all of the issues here! It is likely, indeed, that the recent 4.2.2.1 update of Events Calendar Pro fixed the issues with “runaway” event recurrence—it has fixed those issues for a number of other users.

As for the cleanup process for all of the erroneously-generated events from earlier, one of our developers amde a handy little cleanup plugin that you can find in our 4.2.2.1 blog post here → https://theeventscalendar.com/release-events-calendar-pro-4-2-2-1/

That blog post includes instructions on how to use the plugin, so check out the post, try out the plugin, and let me know if that seems to help with things.

Thank you!
George

[Jeff Rose]

Thanks for the information George.

I downloaded and activated the plug-in but 24 hours later, the total number of events is still 20,500.

I am concerned that the process may have stopped deleting events – or at least it is running too slowly.

Anything else you can advise at this point?

Jeff

[George]

Hey @Jeff,

I’m sorry to hear about the slow processing of that on your site. In thinking of other ways to improve the removal of all of those events, the only other thing I can think of would be to reach out to your web host’s support team to see if they can assist with removing those events on the level of the database.

If you clarify this perhaps, they may be able to go into your database and perform operations there to clear out these events. Other customers have had success with this, but it does depend greatly on your specific host and the scope of their customer support.

I am sorry for the limited number of options here, Jeff.

One thing worth noting additionally is that you might have success by installing the free WordPress plugin WP Crontrol, which can be found here → https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-crontrol/

This plugin lets you manually run scheduled “WP Cron” events; the cleanup process in that helper plugin shared earlier is a WP Cron event, for example.

So, once you install WP Crontrol, you can see the cleanup task like as shown in the top of the table in this screenshot:

The task name to look for is tribe_63556_task. Click “Run”, but only ONCE at a time—do not click it a bunch of times in a row. And please do let it “work” for a few minutes. Check on the number of events after each time you click “Run”. If the number has decreased, then wait a few more minutes and click “Run” again.

I know that this is still not a very ideal method for cleanup, but I hope it helps.

Thank you,
George

[Jeff Rose]

This reply is private.

[Jeff Rose]

I believe that the volume of calendar entries is making the site somewhat unstable (I’m still getting 404 and internal server errors). What is the best way to delete all the events and start from scratch?

Jeff

[George]

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for trying out that task. If that is not helping, then I would recommend consulting further with your web host as described above.

If you have backups of your site before the problem, then these may indeed be useful and you could restore your site to that pre-problem database; update to The Events Calendar 4.2.2 and Events Calendar Pro 4.2.2.1; and then try re-creating your recurring events series from scratch.

This is something you would have to work closely with your web host on—for example, you mention a file whose name is this:

backup_2016-07-19-1842_wwwuusharonorg_8e80181eac1b-db.gz

You would need to work with your web host (or system administrator) to ensure these files are the proper database backups. For example, that file includes the string backup_2016-07-19, which seems to be dating the file to July 19th; yesterday, in other words—so, well after the problems arose.

I’m sorry about the troubles in deleting these events. There are further steps that can be taken from here, but they are all on the level of the database and server, not something we could assist with in terms of the plugin code itself.

Please let me know what further thoughts you might have and if there is anything else I can try to help with.

Sincerely,
George

[Jeff Rose]

It sounds like you would be able to help me delete all the events.

I would like to take you up on that. What are the next steps to get the database cleared out?

I am an administrator for our domain on the host.

Jeff

[George]

Hey Jeff,

Unfortunately, as I have described above, the only next steps that could be taken would be operating on your database or the server itself. We cannot assist with things on that level, and it is best to work with your server administrators / database administrators / web host support team.

I will share this with issue with some developers on our team; they may have some insights as to why the cleanup plugin is not working as well as intended, or may be able to write SQL queries to help cleanup events.

But neither thing may be possible—I only mention this so that you can set your expectations and can get started on reaching out to the sorts of database- and server-involved folks I mentioned above, and get those conversations started.

In them meantime, stay tuned; I or another team member will post updates here when we have them.

Sincerely,
George

[George]

Hey Jeff,

I wanted to reach out to inform you that one of our developers has come up with a solution that may be a bit helpful here.

So, the thing is that the cleanup process SHOULD work once it is actually running on a specific event. The default “cleanup plugin” that I shared earlier with you does this on a scheduled “cron job”. For whatever reason, this not seem to be working well on your server. That could be happening for a number of reasons….

I tried to circumvent this problem by recommending the Crontrol plugin to allow you to manually trigger the action, but that didn’t help.

What MIGHT actually help is a new, modified version of that cleanup plugin that our developer Barry has cooked up just for you today.

You can download this new and (hopefully) improved version of that plugin here ? https://cloudup.com/cOqwwjLMHEB

I would recommend deleting the original cleanup plugin, and then installing this new version.

What’s new about this version? Well, now when you go to any recurring event, you will see a metabox like this in the “edit event” screen for that event:

☝️ Unlike my Crontrol recommendation, this manual cleanup link should actually cause the cleanup process to run for the recurring event.

Does this mean that there is still some manual processing you have to perform? Yes, unfortunately. But please note that the vast number of events on your site is not because of a lot of recurrence series—the previous bugs would just make these series never stop recreating, so even if you had, say, ten recurrence series, (which means you only have ten events to go to and click this “rebuild recurence” button on!), if each series produced 2,000 events erroneously then, boom, you have 20,000 events…in this example, you would go to the first event of each of the ten series and click the “rebuild recurrence”–you would NOT need to click that 20,000 times or anything like that. Perhaps this fact is obvious, but I just wanted to explicitly mention it in case it was a concern!

I hope this helps—try it out and let us know!

George

[Jeff Rose]

I installed and activated the plug-in after deleting the prior fix and I still don’t see the metabox you referenced.

After 10 minutes, I am still getting this message:

Recurring event data is still being generated for this event. Don’t worry, you can safely navigate away – the process will resume in a bit in the background.

If I delete all the Events Calendar plug-ins will that delete all the events?

I don’t mind starting from scratch.

Jeff

[Jeff Rose]

I waited several hours and was finally able to run the process using the metabox.

After a few more hours, the events are only down to 18,808.

I deleted all the plug-ins but apparently, there is no clean-up because when I re-installed, there are still 18,808 events.

I have been working on this for over a week and now I seem to have no choice but to use different plug-ins for my calendar function.

We recently renewed our Events Calendar Pro by Modern Tribe license and I’d like a refund.

I know you tried to help but this just isn’t working.

Jeff

[George]

I’m sorry to hear about all of this, Jeff!

I can process a refund, but am wondering if you could agree with me that it sounds like the new cleanup plugin is working well.

You mention this taking a week—to be clear, that week has been back-and-forth, troubleshooting, updating versions…

It’s only in the last 24 hours, with the sharing of the NEW manual cleanup plugin, that a real solution has been found here.

You mention that after the manual cleanup, you’re down “only” to 18,808. Note, however, that you started with 21,500. You were able to get 20,500 before the new plugin, but with the new plugin, in the last 24 hours alone you have already cleaned up an additional 11–12% of the total recurring events.

So it sounds like this new plugin is doing the job well. Surely not as quickly as is perhaps ideal, but given the 404 issues you described earlier, it sounds like this could be related to your server? It might be performing slowly with all of the events in the database…but as the plugin runs, and more events are removed, this performance may improve.

⚠️ Also, please note: I noticed that your site’s “Cleanup Recurring Events Before” option is set to 12 months, as is the “Cleanup Recurring Events After” option. This is a screenshot of the two options I am referring to:

☝️ If you compress these options to something like 3 months, for example, then it might increase the number of events cleaned up with the manual “cleanup event recurrence” link in the new cleanup plugin.

I would recommend trying this and trying some more manual imports, and seeing how things behave. If you don’t want to, or do and don’t find much meaningful process, let me know and I can process a refund.

Sincerely,
George

[Jeff Rose]

George,

My preference would be to get this resolved.

This morning when I first looked, the total was 19,113 and over an hour later the total was at 18,808 and that is where it stands.

Even though I re-installed the Events calendar, Community Events and the latest fix you provided, I don’t see the metabox or the clean-up options you referred to anymore. This might be because I wasn’t able to re-install the Events Calendar Pro plug-in because my account only has the license for Community Events (another individual in our organization has the Pro license and he is on vacation).

I would ask for help from the host but I don’t know exactly what to tell them.

I tried to fix it myself but could not find the events in any sql database or on the ftp server.

If you were to give me the instructions, maybe I could delete the calendar and start again.

Jeff

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