License Number being rejected even though its active

[Craig Grant]

George or whomever is taking over this ticket,
I look forward to hearing from them, as I have indicated over 30 back and forth replies between us and no resolution after 3+ weeks is not a good result, so hopefully they can help fix my issues.

And, I just heard back from GoDaddy’s Fully Managed Server Support Team that the results of the Slow Query Test they ran determined the Event Calendar Pro plugin is 100% the cause of the issues my VPS is having that is affecting all of my sites on that server to run slowly as the plugin is replicating events at a high rate, running a server query non-stop and causing all the server resources to spike beyond capacity (even though the server is at only 25% server space usage). So I really need help to resolve these issues asap as this is affecting the performance of all of my sites including ones that don’t even have the Event Calendar Pro Plugin. Here’s the script they provided which is the cause of the problems.

SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS DISTINCT wp_posts.*, MIN(wp_postmeta.meta_value) as EventStartDate, MIN(tribe_event_end_date.meta_value) as EventEndDate FROM wp_posts INNER JOIN wp_postmeta ON ( wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id ) LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta as tribe_event_end_date ON ( wp_posts.ID = tribe_event_end_date.post_id AND tribe_event_end_date.meta_key = ‘_EventEndDate’ ) WHERE 1=1 AND ( wp_posts.post_parent = 12910 OR wp_posts.ID = 12910 ) AND (
wp_postmeta.meta_key = ‘_EventStartDate’
) AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘tribe_events’ AND ((wp_posts.post_status = ‘publish’)) AND (wp_postmeta.meta_value >= ‘2016-06-27 14:35:05’ OR (wp_postmeta.meta_value <= ‘2016-06-27 14:35:05’ AND tribe_event_end_date.meta_value >= ‘2016-06-27 14:35:05’ )) GROUP BY wp_posts.ID ORDER BY EventStartDate ASC, wp_posts.post_date ASC LIMIT 27120, 10;

[Craig Grant]

I was able to fix the domain issue on OMCAR.com by editing one record in the WP_Options table that contained the omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com url, but tried the same process for rairc.com by making sure there were zero instances of staging.yournewsites.com in any of the data tables in WP including WP_Options and then updating the plugin license (disconnecting the domain in my tribe account, then remove and then readd the license in the Events Calendar Pro plugin settings and refreshing the license key page in my tribe account) and the rairc.com site still shows staging2.yournewsites.com in my Tribe Account. Note the reason I have indicated I am frustrated with the support is 30+ replies on this ticket and at no point was I given any hint to check the WP_Options table. But again, this fixed one domain (omcar.com) and not the other (rairc.com) so the issue still persists.

I also added a license to the RETI.us domain, so I am going to create a second ticket for that one regarding the events replicating and causing major server issues with the info provided in my post yesterday. But the bottomline is I am a very unhappy customer because the plugin has been very buggy on multiple installs and the support as detailed has been unhelpful to say the least.

[Craig Grant]

George,
Seeing as you closed the ticket regarding reti.us, the only way for me to respond to you is in this ticket. It is one thing to not fix any of my issues, but now you have become completely unprofessional. I just reviewed the reply from 6/24 where you added the Personal License and nowhere in it did you specify it was just for OMCAR.com and I assumed you added it to my account to address my overall frustration. And for you to remove that license completely from my account just now because OMCAR.com is now fixed (by my doing, nothing you helped with), is ridiculous as it is still an issue with RAIRC.com.

Plus I have indicated I am willing to add more licenses but am hesitant to do so based on how buggy the plugin has been on all 4 sites I have installed it on and on top of that dealing with you. So if you are the only person I can deal with, please let me know and I will look into another solution going forward and will most definitely leave a negative review of the plugin as you continue to make a bad situation even worse with your lack of assistance and lack of professionalism.

[Geoff]

Hi Craig,

My name is Geoff and I head up support here at Modern Tribe. George brought this thread to my attention and I wanted to reach out to you directly.

First off, it’s clear that we’ve fallen way short of your expectations and this exchange has created a lot more frustration than help. I have had long and crummy experiences in support forums in the past as a customer and totally understand how you would be disappointed here. The amount of back-and-forth here is definitely unacceptable. I personally acknowledge that I should have been more involved in this conversation earlier and for that, I am sincerely sorry.

That said, I do want to clarify a few points from this exchange because I truly believe there were a number of misunderstandings on both sides here that need to be cleared out.

If I read through this thread correctly, the primary trouble being reported was the inability to activate a license key on a multiple sites. Looking at your account, you do indeed have a Business-level license and that entitles you to activate the license key on up to three separate websites and to receive automatic updates and support for the plugins on those sites. From the sound of it, these are the three sites where the license key had been activated:

• http://www.ralsc.org
• http://www.omcar.com
• http://www.rairc.com

And this thread was specifically concerning the trouble in activating the license on www.omcar.com, which has both a staging and production site with the staging URL on a subdomain of another domain called yournewsites.com.

To be clear, our licenses count each domain as a separate install, whether it is technically a development site or not. For that reason, you were getting the notice about being out of installs because, technically, you were out of installs considering you had already registered the license key on three different domains.

Looking past the back and forth of responses that resulted from you helping George understand that configuration, I see that George offered you a free Personal-level license to help cope with the inconvenience of having to switch the license key between the staging and development sites. Normally, we would point a customer to this tutorial and ask that if more installs are needed, then an upgraded license would be required. However, George seems to have gone beyond that by providing you with a license for that free of charge for the sole purpose of not having to deal with juggling licenses between the two sites. While not all of George’s replies were pleasant, I do believe this was a generous move on his part and it should be noted that using that free license to get additional support on a fourth site in addition to the ones listed above would be a misuse of that generosity.

In reading the replies in this thread, it seems the topic also shifted away from the original issue and into additional things you were experiencing with shortcodes and site performance. It’s no wonder the back-and-forth reached such a high level and that is why we encourage folks to open one support thread per topic. That makes it much easier to focus on the issue at hand and gives you the opportunity to have multiple staff members assisting you at once for efficiency. And, again, the support for those topics ought to be directly related to one of the sites registered to the license key.

I genuinely hope this thread helps at least get us back to the topic at hand, which is sharing license keys between staging and development sites. Were you still looking for license key support above what it appears George has already done? Please let me know and we can go from there.

Sincerely,
Geoff

[Craig Grant]

Geoff,
Thank you for getting involved and I appreciate you doing so as yes I am definitely at the point where I am pretty frustrated with this experience especially dealing with George. While I totally understand the fact that the 4th site RETI.us did not have a paid license, that issue just started the other day and while George did make a good gesture by granting me a free license, it was not clear at all that it was supposed to be used for the omcar.com site as he specified in his last response (especially when it was not the only domain with an issue at that time).

As for the overall issue, from the beginning of the ticket licenses of 2 of the 3 domains were were screwed up, omcar.com and rairc.com. The plugin for Omcar.com wouldn’t update due to the license issue and rairc.com was showing as rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com.

Once we got the plugins to update with the instructions George provided, a whole new set of issues arose as all the calendar events on the site started producing 404s because the permalinks got screwed up (it took George several days to address that). Then the display I had prior to the update (mini calendar with limit=”0″ in one column and event list=”3″ in a column to the right of it) wouldn’t work with the same short code I had before the update. So what started as 2 issues turned into multiple and George was pretty useless in helping me solve them as this has dragged on for 3-weeks.

It took George over 20 responses to understand that the staging.yournewsites.com urls were aliases redirecting to the domains (even though I stated it multiple times) and even to date he still gave me zero insight into how to fix it. I was able to figure it out for omcar.com but that problem still persists for rairc.com showing rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com in your system. Basically he kept replying asking the same questions over and over and not incorporating anything I had provided him into account, which just kept wasting more and more time while the issues were still affecting my live sites.

As someone who runs a software development company I can understand the protocol of not providing support to free accounts, but I can’t believe the issue was ignored when I provided proof that the plugin was replicating events from 200 to 60,000 in a matter of a couple of days and was literally crashing a dedicated vps all by itself. Especially when I am already a paying customer and indicated if my experiences were better I would have already upgraded to add a license to reti.us (which George never offered to me). It appears I have fixed that issue myself (again not even a hint of help from George).

So the only remaining problem is the rairc.com license pointing to rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com. If you can give me some insights how to fix that and also assure me that George is not the only one on the support team I will try to give this a clean slate going forward.

One separate thing is I have been trying to mess with the Event Pro widgets and find them very limiting, is there anything that can be done to enhance them (ex. ability to hide dates with no events in the list or have calendar display with list, not just when someone clicks on a calendar date, etc.)?

Thank you. Craig

[Geoff]

Hi Craig and thanks for following up.

It sounds as though we are on the same wavelength for the most part and we are both game to try to move this forward in a positive direction. That’s awesome and much appreciated.

At the same time, I do want to address a couple of points you raised because I think they are important to help bridge an understanding of how we provide support and the reasons why we do.

As someone who runs a software development company I can understand the protocol of not providing support to free accounts, but I can’t believe the issue was ignored when I provided proof that the plugin was replicating events from 200 to 60,000 in a matter of a couple of days and was literally crashing a dedicated vps all by itself.

You can rest assured that the issue is not ignored. We are always sincerely interested in genuine bug reports and do note them in a centralized system that everyone here on our support, development and QA teams review, test, and prioritize according to what is currently being developed and how prevalent the reported is in the community. As such, your report was noted and is the first we have seen of this nature, so it’s being prioritized as it comes in.

The nature of supporting that issue, however, is another thing because it exists on a site that has not paid for direct support. In other words, your report is heard loud and clear but the expectation for directly supporting it with you has to be lowered for reasons we both agree on when it comes to free accounts. I realize that may not have come off clearly in the initial exchange with George, but I do hope this helps set the right level of expectation moving forward.

Once we got the plugins to update with the instructions George provided, a whole new set of issues arose as all the calendar events on the site started producing 404s because the permalinks got screwed up (it took George several days to address that).

The difficult thing here is George’s recommendation to upgrade is solid but also unveiled other conflicts that may not have existed before that were not directly related to the original topic. That creates a scenario where, as you saw, the conversation gets clouded up between what is on and off topic toward resolving the main topic of the thread. For that reason, we still recommend opening new threads for each issue since that will help bring other team members on board and keep the conversations neatly moving forward. Again, that may not have been clear in the initial exchanges, but I hope it does clarify the situation a bit.

…and also assure me that George is not the only one on the support team I will try to give this a clean slate going forward.

While I think it’s fairly obvious George is not the only person on this support team, I am happy to reassure you of that and you can refer to our team page for a full view of all the people it takes to keep The Events Calendar, Event Tickets and all our premium extensions developed, maintained, and supported.

So the only remaining problem is the rairc.com license pointing to rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com.

This gets us back to the topic at hand and should be the mark for which we base all our conversations moving forward. In fact, let’s go back to the original question:

Also a 2nd site is set up for rairc.yournewsites.com which was a staging URL which is no longer used as the site is now live and active at the domain rairc.com. Do I need to disconnect the prior url and then add the new one and if I do will the license number change or have to be re-added to that sites WordPress admin?

Yes, you would need to disconnect the license key from the staging URL and set it up on the new active URL. We have a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this, but here’s what it basically boils down to:

• Log into the WordPress admin for rairc.yournewsites.com
• Head to Events > Settings > Licenses
• Remove the License Key from the screen and save your settings
• Log into your site here on this site, theeventscalendar.com
• Head to My Account > Licenses
• Click the “Disconnect now” link next to the URL of the old staging domain (rairc.yournewsites.com)
• Log into the WordPress admin for rairc.com
• Head to Events > Settings > Licenses
• Enter the license key that was being used on rairc.yournewsites.com

In looking at your account, here are the currently registered sites I see to date:

• http://www.ralsc.org
• http://www.omcar.com
• rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com

Following the above instructions should effectively replace rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com with rairc.com. Please let me know if that does the trick and we can continue from there.

Thanks again for following up!
Geoff

[Craig Grant]

Geoff,
Thank you again for your response and I agree we are definitely on the same wavelength and moving in the right direction together now.

As for your response on the RETI.us item, I completely understand the policy of not supporting free accounts and that you are stating the issue was acknowledged by your team but I think you have to understand that from my side at the time, going on George’s response (as he was the only person I have had contact with) I felt the issue was being totally ignored. Despite the fact I told him it was replicating at an alarming rate, he did not say we are looking into it, give me anything I could try on my end or recommend and give me options to add a license to that domain. He basically gave zero input on it. I assumed that he provided me that extra license to add to that domain to get it addressed and once I submitted the ticket for it, he immediately removed the license from my account, chastised me and closed the ticket without offering any help or options. So that problem was totally compounded by the way George handled (or lack there of) it.

With the original issues reported becoming more issues once I updated the plugin, I again feel that problem was also totally compounded by George as he never once recommended that I create new/separate tickets and as I have detailed he kept asking the same questions over and over and wasn’t incorporating the details I provided him (which included marked up screenshots & even cached versions of sites) which just kept wasting day after day of the issues not being resolved affecting my clients live sites.

And that doesn’t even factor in the way he was very unprofessional and even challenged me at times (his response on 6/29 which has been removed from this thread where he states “Does this anger you? Does this make you want to write how you are upset with support. That is fine”).

So, bottomline is I am very happy to hear there are other members on your team as in my opinion he just made a bad situation much worse with the way he handled things. If he was a member of my support team he would be fired because I was on the verge of cancelling and provided the plugin a pretty negative rating/review before you got involved.

As for the steps you provided to try and fix the rair.com license. I have already tried those several times with no success. And an important detail is that as we have discussed, the rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com is an alias of rairc.com so there is no possibility to log into rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com/wp-admin and then separately log into rairc.com/wp-admin as they are the same place seeing as the rairc.staging.yournewsites.com/wp=admin redirects to rairc.com/wp-admin. So please let me know if there is any other option to fix this.

Thank you again.

[Geoff]

Hi Craig,

Looking specifically at this:

And an important detail is that as we have discussed, the rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com is an alias of rairc.com so there is no possibility to log into rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com/wp-admin and then separately log into rairc.com/wp-admin as they are the same place seeing as the rairc.staging.yournewsites.com/wp=admin redirects to rairc.com/wp-admin. So please let me know if there is any other option to fix this.

I have dug into this myself and some others on the team and the issue is still not crystal clear to us. That isn’t to say there isn’t an issue here, but there’s confusion (both on our part as well as yours, I think) about the configuration of your hosting setup. It could also point to something in the site’s database that is not properly updating and causing the license key to continue to reference the staging site.

 

The one thing we can do on our end is update the record of your license in our own database and point it directly to rairc.com. That way, there would be no doubt that the data entered in our system does indeed point to that domain. And, if the license key is still out of installs at that point, then that should at least confirm that the issue is either on the hosting side of things or perhaps a stray item in the site’s database that needs to be changed.

I went ahead and upgraded your Business license to an Agency license. This provides you with more slots to register your sites and I have gone ahead and put in all of your staging and production domains manually into our database, including the reti.us domain you were also seeking support for.

That brings the registered sites to the following:

• http://www.ralsc.org
• http://www.omcar.com
• http://www.rairc.com
• rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com
• rairc.staging.yournewsites.com
• ralsc.staging.yournewsites.com
• omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com
• reti.us

Those all show as active and valid in both our database and system, so we should be good to go. Please let me know if it is not.

And please note that I think this is a good workaround for the issue currently, but we would like to open a ticket for our development team to dig into this further to see if there’s anything we can do on our end to prevent it in the future. That said, if you are willing to provide us with an export of the http://www.rairc.com database (as a private reply) then that would help us do some investigative work.

Thanks,
Geoff

[Craig Grant]

Geoff,
First I want to thank you for doing this including adding reti.us license to the account. And yes I would be happy to provide you a backup of rairc.com db. Can you please provide instructions how to do this and I will be happy to do so.

[Geoff]

Sure thing, Craig.

Exporting a database can be done a number of ways, but this WordPress Codex article provides excellent detailed instructions for the most common methods.

Once you have a ZIP file of the database, it would be awesome if you could upload it to a sharing service (like Dropbox) and send the link over here as a private reply.

Just to confirm: is everything pulling up correctly in your WordPress dashboard(s) now that the license keys have been manually entered in our system? Please let me know.

Thanks so much!
Geoff

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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