Need to Delete Hundreds of Duplicate Events

[lishal]

I’ve been using Events Calendar Pro for a few years, but recently it has been acting weird. I’ve gotten thousands of duplicate events showing up in my calendar, they eat up a lot of space and manually deleting them all is tedious and extremely time consuming. I don’t know how it has created all these duplicates and when I go to look at these duplicated events, they come up with 404 errors. They exist in the Events listing and they’re listing as “recurring”, but there doesn’t seem to be a root event that set these all up and when I try to edit them, they reload the events page instead of taking me to the event’s edit screen.

I’ve deleted transients, but all these duplicates are still in the database. My only recourse at the moment is to delete them using a SQL query but my fear is that this will happen again. There was a plugin that existed for this purpose a while ago called Housekeeper, but it seems to have disappeared. Any help would be appreciated because I really don’t want to manually delete over 4000 duplicate events or run a SQL query only to have this happen once again.

[Nico]

Hi there @lishal,

Thanks for reaching out to us and sorry to hear about this duplicates issue you are experiencing 🙁

We do not have the Housekeeper plugin around, but I’ll ask the dev team if they have an updated version or something that can work the same way.

Have you noticed this happening after any direct action (updating WordPress or The Events Calendar or other plugin)? Can you check the server error logs to see if there’s something there that might be useful to understand the root of the issue?

From what you state I understand this just happened once or is this something that’s happening frequently? What was the title of the event? Do you remember creating said event?

Sorry for the many follow-up questions, just trying to get some clues on where this might be coming from!

Best,
Nico

[lishal]

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[Sean Sullivan]

I posted about a similar problem a few days ago: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/recurring-events-repeating-multiple-times-in-the-same-day/

I have about 7,000 dupes to delete. I’m not getting 404 errors, but they seem to be exponentially reproducing, Gremlins style.

[Nico]

Hey @lishal,

Thanks for sending the db dump, I’ve created an internal ‘support ticket’ for this case to be reviewed. This process can take a bit more time than the usual exchange, but I’ll keep you posted on any progress. Really hope we can find a solution for this quickly!

@ Sean, sorry to hear about your issue too. It sounds that you could be affected by the same issue described here, but it might also be another thing going on on your site. For now I think the best will be you continue to work on this with Hunter (I’ll keep him posted as well if I have any news on this case) and also see what comes out from the ‘support ticket’ about this issue.

Thanks both for the patience while we work on this,
Best,
Nico

[Nico]

Hi @lishal,

Some additional test showed the plugin I’ve sent you previously (https://cloudup.com/cPv3ZMX8Zd0) should help you out cleaning your database. But it was my bad for not sending complete instructions on how to run the clean up. I’m really sorry for that!

So please go ahead and re-install the clean up plugin. Once that’s activated navigate to Events > Settings > General and find the Duplicate Recurring Events button. Cleanup takes a long time and its possible you’ll need to re-run it if things time out on your site, but it should work (it did for us running against your db).

@ Sean, please give this a try as well. As I stated earlier you might be facing a different issue but hopefully this will work for you as well!

Please give that a second try and let me know about it,
Best,
Nico

[lishal]

Hi Nico, I really appreciate your continued help with this issue. I reinstalled the plugin, went in and started merging duplicate events. Things were going along as expected, and we managed to remove around a third of the duplicates. However, we’ve reached a snag. Now, whenever we go to Settings and click on the Merge button, it sends us to a blank white screen and doesn’t appear to want to do the merging anymore.

[Nico]

Hi Lishal,

Thanks for the heads-up, I’m glad to hear you could make some progress on this!

Now, whenever we go to Settings and click on the Merge button, it sends us to a blank white screen and doesn’t appear to want to do the merging anymore.

Does this happen right before you click the button or does it take some time before going blank? Do you see any errors in the PHP error log related to this?

From what the dev working on this reported, he was able to clean up all the duplicates using this tool. So maybe it’s timing out because some server constrain?

Please let me know about it,
Best,
Nico

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• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by lishal.

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