Issues Removing Licenses from Staging

[Thomas]

Good evening,

I realized—my bad—that I had my single-site licenses (PRO + FB add-on) on both staging and prod.

I read your KB article and removed the licenses from staging.

I cleared the caches, removed the licenses from prod and added them again. I still get Sorry, this key is out of installs.

What should I do now? Any advice would be appreciated 🙂

Thanks a lot for your time!
Best,
-Thomas

[Brook]

Howdy Thomas,

I would love to assist here.

I realized—my bad—that I had my single-site licenses (PRO + FB add-on) on both staging and prod.

That is not your bad at all! We encourage people to have staging servers whenever possible. If we had a surefire way of detecting when a licenses is registered to a staging server and a live one, we would try to automate this so you did not have to hassle with it.

You mentioned that you removed the licenses from Production and added it again. That is usually not even necessary. As the KB article outlines the primary two things you need to do are:

1. Remove the license from staging, just to be safe.
2. Disconnect the license, by visiting My Account > Licenses in the upper right of this page and clicking “Disconnect Now”.

The second step there is by far the most important. Once disconnected the license will be available for activation on any other server, including production and staging. Whichever one connects first with your license key will take over the license and activate it. So if staging has no license, or production connects first, then the production server will now be the licensed entity.

Did clicking “Disconnect Now” a second time do the trick?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Thomas]

Hey Brook!

Thanks for your kind note.

Loss aversion was very strong yesterday night 😉 and I didn’t dare disconnecting the site. I did that and it worked.

Just to share a bit more why I didn’t do this: I simply didn’t see a way to re-connect the site from the licenses page. I realized afterwards that one doesn’t have to do anything but enter a valid license in the plugins settings page. The license is validated and the site is automatically added to the licenses page. That is something that I didn’t infer from the documentation or the UI. I thought I would share…

Thanks again for your help! I can’t recommend The Events Calendar enough to friends and colleagues! You guys are the best!

-Thomas

[Brook]

You are very welcome! I can understand the concern over a button like “disconnect now”. One thing we try to make abundantly clear is that nothing bad happens when a site does not have a license. Your events data will not be altered or lost, you are not restricted from accessing any part of the plugins, nor anything like this. The only thing that does happen is you can not automatically update the plugin in WP Admin > Plugins. You can still manually update the plugin, assuming you have a valid license and thus can download the new version from our site here. But automatic updates are not possible. Because of this some people actually prefer to have their staging server licensed/receiving automatic updates, as they have disabled automatic updates on production.

I will pass your feedback on to our website design team. Thanks!

– Brook

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