iCal Importer Events Disappearing – Entire Calendars Going Blank

[Matthew]

We are syncing with Google Calendar (tested with iCalendar Validator that all iCal links are valid and parsing, save for the

Error was: Property [ORGANIZER] must be specified once

which the validation tool points to a method being unnecessary but these are from Google after all so not like we can alter their code.

Our master school calendar appears to have no issues maintaining sync. It has a different iCal URL. Our Athletics schedules are split out into one calendar per sport, using keywords in the event (and importer) to filter each sport to the appropriate calendar. This of course turns on 30+ imports to cover all of the athletic teams. In addition to having these all houses as subcalendars under a master Athletics calendar (located here: http://www.sjcatholicschool.org/events/category/athletics/), we have them display as sidebar items for each sport (see Football here, which presently is missing the import as of this posting: http://www.sjcatholicschool.org/athletics/teams/football/).

Everything looked fine at first, but then we had parents reporting that sport-specific events were missing or “when are football events going to be posted”. At first we worried the 30+ calendars running every 15 minutes could be to blame, so we changed it to once daily on Thursday and we still are having issues. Sometimes it will import and all events will be present. Other times all events go away. I am not sure if this is due to a failure of import or what, but they all just simply go away 100%.

I looked at your forums and have looked for events moved to trash or marked for deletion but they are not there. The events related to these calendars are 100% gone with no trace. Magically during a subsequent import they will reappear from time to time.

We need this fixed or we need to get a refund on both Pro and iCal Importer purchases. Please advise. Time is of the essence with school (and sports) starting back.

[Matthew]

I manually selected all three levels (Varsity, JV, and Middle School) of Football for import and they manually worked just now. So when the sync/import runs properly, the events do get posted. Does your process first nuke all events for the calendar prior to the sync? It seems like your process should be to test for a successful load of the iCal URL prior to deleting entries, but I cannot confirm in testing (manual runs have not failed yet in testing) if that is how it works or not. Also of note is that when the events “disappear” we do not show the imports as having failed. The only imports marked as “failed” are for sports that have zero events on the Google Calendar yet (e.g. Spring sports and the import doesn’t find a match for the keyword filter).

[Brook]

Howdy Matthew,

I would love to help you move towards a solution here.

So when the sync/import runs properly, the events do get posted. Does your process first nuke all events for the calendar prior to the sync?

That’s an interesting line of thinking to explain your problem, but no the calendar does not do that. It first builds a list of all events in the iCal file, then it goes through them one by one. If the event already exists, it updates the data. If it does not exist, it gets created. At no point does it actually delete the event, especially in bulk like that.

What website host are you running on? Is there any form of caching in place, particularly on the server side?

We need this fixed or we need to get a refund on both Pro and iCal Importer purchases. Please advise. Time is of the essence with school (and sports) starting back.

That is totally fair. I would love to help you figure out what’s going on and find a fix. But your issue is definitely exotic, not something I’ve seen before. And I am a bit puzzled why it is happening. To be up front it might take a goodly bit of troubleshooting to figure out what’s going, and there is only so much I can do on my end. A lot of it might end up being me walking you through things and relying on your eyes and such to fill in the rest. If that does not sound like something you wanted to do then please checkout our refund page:

Refund Policy

It will walk you through getting a refund for those two recently purchased licenses you have.

If you’d like to keep troubleshooting please let me know the answers to those questions. 🙂

Cheers!

– Brook

[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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