Odd recurring events – hundreds created – how to delete

[Mary]

I am not sure how I did this but it looks like I created over 200K instances of an event within the Calendar Pro plugin. The net result is that it has completely bogged down the website. I need to delete them but it seems that this request can’t be fulfilled by the server without creating an error.

I can’t even back up the website at this point due to it’s size with these.

I’ve tried going into one of the events and deleting it. It crashed overnight once. This morning it looked like I was about to move over 3000 of them to TRASH. But I can’t “EMPTY” trash. Even for individual files that I “permanently delete” they are still showing up in the TRASH folder and when I try to delete again it tells me that the file has already been deleted. So it would seem that I have multiple bad things going on. But the most pressing is getting rid of those 200,000+ duplicate events.

Attached is a screenshot of a few of the items in the TRASH. The last two on the page begin the thousands of repeating items.

Suggestions?

Thanks.
Mary

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Mary and welcome back!

Thank you for reaching out to us.

We are sorry to hear about the recurring events that have gone out of control on your website. Yikes!
I would love to help you with this topic.

Fortunately, there is a cure for it!

Before you do anything, I would highly recommend a database backup.

Here is the procedure to follow:

1. Using phpMyAdmin, run the following SQL script: https://gist.github.com/elimn/a998d7b67f6166dab5e17ec071eb35ee – this will likely return 1 or maybe 2 event IDs that have the runaway recurrence issue
2. Edit/update those event IDs in WP Admin. This can usually be accomplished by adding a space to end of the event description and hitting update. This will cause it to rebuild the recurrence and remove the offending entries.

If that does not work, then you can use the following SQL script to delete all recurrence of any event id: https://gist.github.com/elimn/e5de5d2037678de0b926c307022571c5

Once that’s completed, you should easily be able to return in the parent recurring event, recreate the recurrence rules and the problem should be gone.

Let me know how that goes.

Best regards,
Geoff B.

 

[Mary]

Thanks, Gregg. That took care of the issue. Not sure how the multiple events got created so I hope it doesn’t happen again. But we’re all set for now.

Much appreciated!
Mary

[Geoff B.]

Good morning Mary,

I am super stoked that this worked out for you.
I certainly do hope this does not happen again too!

You are welcome back on our support forums any time 🙂

For now, I am going to close this thread.

Have a great week!

Geoff B.

[Author]

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