MAJOR ISSUE: ATTENDEE DATA NOT SAVED IF 10 OR MORE TICKETS ADDED

[FRANK]

Hi there,

I have been working on this integration for about 2 months and we were all but ready to go live with tickets sales but just by chance when putting through a last test order for a large number of tickets we came across this issue.

All the testing to date was for small order quantities and everything was working absolutely great.

However, we just noticed this morning if you add 10 tickets and those ticket have custom questions for attendee data then that data is not saved. If you order 9 or less tickets it works great.

I have done all the testing for conflicts guide. Disabled all plugins, changed to default theme, removed all template overrides and so on and still the same problem seems to be present.

We have missed out launch date now so any and urgent help to get to the bottom of this would be most appreciated .

If you need any additional information from us let me know and I will provide whatever is needed to get this issue fixed.

Be great if I am just missing something simple! Hopefully something silly from my end as so much time and money invested in this for it not to work now would be a disaster.

Thank you in advance for your kind and urgent assistance.

Kind regards,

Frank

[FRANK]

Just a quick update since I posted this with some information that might help solve this issue.

I have spent hours testing this trying to get it fixed and the following patterns emerged.

For each event we run there are 65 tickets available through global stock.

We have 3 ticket types. 2 of which required attendee data to be entered. There are 5 attendee questions, 2 of which are dropdowns, the rest text input fields.

When all set up as we would like you can book up to 10 tickets on each of the 2 ticket types that have attendee questions before it breaks. Breaks as in saves no attendee data and wipes from the event all previously entered attendee data.

I created a test event and started playing around with the custom fields.

When I create at ticket and have 3 attendee questions, all input text fields, I can buy up to 20 tickets without problem. As soon as I buy 21 tickets the attendee data is not saved and it wipes all previously entered data from that event.

When I change the number of attendee questions up to 5, again all text input fields it all works great up to 12 and if I try and buy 13 again it breaks down exactly the same as above.

If I take it a step further and make 2 of those 5 questions dropdowns then it works great up until you book 11 tickets then same thing happens.

I then tried going back to one questions for attendee meta and could book up to 59 tickets at the one time without any issue but when I booked 60 in one go the exact same problem arises: no attendee meta saved and all previous meta wiped from event.

From that it seems to there is a direct correletaion between the number of attendee meta fields/questions and how many tickets you can book per ticket before issues start occurring.

Maybe somewhere this is some kind of restriction in terms of file size, db dumps or something is timing out I really don’t know but there is a clear and distinct relationship between the two factors.

Really appreciate any help and direction on this as we are loosing money by the hour not being live with this just now.

Is there a minimum version of PHP or MySQL that we should be using as well just in case some kind of conflict here as well?

Thanks for your kind and urgent attention to this matter.

Regards,

Frank

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Frank and welcome back!

Thank you for reaching out to us, for the great amount of tests you have performed and for providing your system information.

We are sorry to hear about this major issue impacting you the way it does!
I would love to help you with this topic.

I have been able to reproduce this on my install.

This is without a doubt a very important bug which is now one of our top priorities. We do apologize for the inconvenience this is causing.
Unfortunately, I cannot commit to a release date for a fix at this point. But you will be contacted as soon as there is one.

Normally, whenever possible, we try to provide a temporary workaround for such issues.

Hang tight as Dev looks into that tomorrow.

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[FRANK]

Hi Geoff B,

Thanks for the response and your efforts to date taking this matter forward.

This really is a pressing matter for us so all your efforts to address this bug and provide a temporary workaround or a quick fix would really be appreciated.

We sell about 8000 tickets per year for these events and the demand is huge. Our promotional push was that they would be on sale by now so we having to backtrack a little but hopefully no custom will be lost as a result of the delay. It is a very competitive market so we need to be on the ball here and get going before the opportunity is lost in terms of maximising sales again this year.

I appreciate you cannot commit to a release date but a temporary fix for us would be extremely welcome so hopefully your dev team can pull this out the bag for us today.

Keep at the dev team for us and thanks for your continued efforts resolving this on our behalf.

Hope to hear some positive news on this shortly.

Thanks,

Frank

[FRANK]

Hi there,

Just wondering if any luck with this issue?

I know sometimes these things can take time but if any progress at all let me know as have an client here to keep informed who is far from happy at the moment.

Thanks,

Frank

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Frank,

Thank you for writing back and taking the time to express the importance of this for your organization.

Please know that we take this matter very seriously as well and I am terribly sorry about the inconvenience, especially provided the timing of things.

In fact, we share your goal: we would like to resolve this ASAP.
That being said, full disclosure, even with our best ressources tackling this, it might take a few days to pinpoint and have a fix.

At the time of writing, I unfortunately do not have any updates for you on this topic. I do promise to keep you updated as soon as there is any progress on this.

That being said, since time is of the essence, if you are up for it, I would like to suggest something that might serve as a workaround.
Provided the situation, I think it is worth a shot.

My idea would be to downgrade your plugins. You can read all about it here: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/downgrading-plugin-past-version/

If in fact this bug was only introduced in a recent version, reverting back to a previous version should fix the issue temporarily.

To save time, I would recommend rolling back all the way to 4.2 first, moving up towards the latest version (ideally in a staging environment).
As a side note, whatever you do, please do not install version 4.2.2 of the Events Calendar Pro as there was a glitch with recurring events in it. You should favour 4.2.2.1 instead.

Of course, as with anything else, before you do anything, it is highly recommended to do a complete database backup first.

I wish I had a better answer for you, but for now it’s the best one I have.

Let me know how that goes.

Best regards,
Geoff B.

[FRANK]

Hi Geoff B,

Appreciate the update and suggestion.

I am definitely up for giving that a try as anything worth a shot at this stage.

That might work so I will keep you posted on how I get on with that.

Thanks for your understanding of the situation.

Regards,

Frank

[FRANK]

Hi Geoff B,

I have worked through the downgrading and retested it using the same parameters as mentioned in a previous post.

Unfortunately, the exact same problem under the same circumstance occurred so it looks like this bug has been there since day one.

I downgraded The Events Calendar to v4.2, Event Tickets to v4.2 and Events Tickets Plus to 4.2.2 (this was the oldest version available in my downloads section on my account).

Maybe that information will help your guys solve this quickly. It is a difficult situation but some comfort can be taken that we found this out just before going live. Had we been taking ticket sales and lost all the attendee data provided it would have been one monumental disaster for myself, the client and customers.

I know you guys will do your best and hopefully be able to fix this quick for all concerned.

Thanks again and keep the pressure on for me for a quick fix at least, happy with a temporary workaround if one can be found short term, anything at all I am willing to try and work with any other suggestions you guys can come up with.

Regards,

Frank

[Geoff B.]

Good afternoon Frank,

Thank you for trying this out.
I actually took it a step further and downgraded all the way back to 4.1 (where it all began).

Unfortunately, I ended up with the same results as you: the bug is still there.

I just had a conversation with our product director about this bug and it is definitely at the very top of our list right now.
We are very aware of how terrible the consequences of such a bug can be! Once again we are very sorry about this completely unintended issue.

In the meantime, the only “workaround” I have for now is not great, but it should buy you some time.

What you could do is temporarily limit the quantity of tickets that can be purchased simultaneously.
I realize it’s far from perfect, but since we know exactly where the threshold is, at least you could get this thing running.

To do that, you could either use a snippet or a third-party plugin such as:

1. https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-incremental-product-quantities/
2. https://wordpress.org/plugins/min-and-max-purchase-for-woocommerce/
3. https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-max-quantity/

Hang tight as we sort this one out!

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[FRANK]

Hi Geoff B,

Thanks again for your continued support and understanding of the situation.

I will discuss this with the client and look at implementing this workaround with their agreement and see how that goes.

If they are happy with this short term then as you rightly say, while not ideal, at least it will buy us all some time.

While I am happy to see if that works, as I am sure you can understand, my confidence in the system is a little shaken at the moment so even with that possible workaround there is a worry there that something else might be lurking around the corner. That said, I have tested it all thoroughly and to be fair it does all look in good shape aside from this issue.

I look forward to any updates, even if just to say still working on it, so I can keep communicating with my client as that keeps them in the loop and lets them see the matter is in hand.

Sometimes these things happen and I have to say your support to date has been top class and if this can be resolved quickly with a permanent fix then you guys will have excelled yourselves. Nothing ever runs perfect so when things do go wrong the measure of any organisation is how they respond so I take my hat off to you guys for your efforts so far.

Kind regards,

Frank

[Geoff B.]

Good afternoon Frank,

Thank you for writing back, for your understanding and for your great words.

Yes, I totally understand that your confidence might not be at a high point as it stands.
As you stated earlier, even with testing, there can be completely undesired bugs that creep in as new features are rolled out.

We take this matter and any other bug very seriously. In fact this is why we have a maintenance release scheduled every 2 weeks.
We just hate bugs!

Let me know how it goes with your client. On my end, I will continue with a daily follow-up on the issue with the Dev team.

Have a good week-end,

Geoff B.

[FRANK]

Hi Geoff B,

Thanks for touching base on this matter again.

I have worked through those plugins in the links provided, some were old outdated ones. I searched around and found some others as well and tried them all out.

One thing none of them did was prevent a customer selecting any quantity they like, even if restrictions in place. They were only warned about the maximum quantity after adding to cart and no warnings were given on the ET tickets.php under the wootickets directory at all which all would only lead to a lot of confusion and with no easy way to modify your cart after adding the tickets and custom meta this would have caused no ends of issues for a customer.

However, I did some digging around for a solution that works for us and came across a snippet of code the universally limits the quantity of each individual product (tickets in this case). Adding it to the functions file did the trick. This thankfully does work on the tickets.php page before adding to the cart preventing the above scenarios materialising. I have added some explanatory text to the page for the user to explain and between that I think we have something that is workable short term at least. Group and volume buying of tickets is a big feature of the needs of our customers so we still need a permanent fix moving forward.

I am running another series to tests with that new functionality added to limit the ticket quantities and once satisfied that works without issue I think we will just run with that until you guys get the chance to get rid of that bug.

Thanks for all your help so far and enjoy the weekend!

Regards,

Frank

[Geoff B.]

Good afternoon Frank,

Kudos on finding the universal snippet and for coming up with a solution that, even if imperfect, works short term.

On our end, we did make some progress on this issue: we identified the cause of the issue and we are currently testing alternate methods to save the data in the DB.

As you can imagine, we want to thoroughly test this before releasing a fix (to avoid a similar scenario).

Hang tight as we do just that and have a great week!

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[FRANK]

Hi Geoff B,

Thanks for the update.

Good to hear the cause of the bug identified and totally understand the need for thorough testing.

We are now live and taking bookings with the temporary workaround until you guys release an update with the bug fix.

Orders are coming through and we are keeping a nervous eye on the orders, checking each one as it comes through to make sure no similar issues or other bugs in there. I can report, so far so good.

Group bookings is a big income stream for this client so while we can placate the tour operators in the short term we will need to in the coming says or weeks be able to allow bookings for more than 9 tickets. The sooner the better but I know you guys hard at is so that gives us confidence moving forward.

We have over 100 events every year, selling in excess of 8000 tickets so a solid stable and bug free system is imperative to us which, apart from this issue, TEC stacks up well with tons of potential over and above all the good stuff it is already capable of.

Look forward to more positive news on this front in the coming days.

Kind regards,

Frank

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Frank,

Thank you for reporting on how the workaround is going for you.
I am mostly glad you can capture all of your attendee info.

You are absolutely right, such a temporary limit is really not cool.
In fact, our goal is for all of our customers, including big players / vendors such as yourself, is that they are fully happy with our solutions, knowing that they can handle some serious volume.

So far, 4 different viable solutions have been identified to do just that.
We are currently testing them out to ensure to have the most scalable and robust one.

Thank you once again for your patience and for helping us make our products better.
We really appreciate it.

Best regards,

Geoff B.

 

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