Past events showing up in "this week"

[nysci]

I think this problem was caused by some recent updates to the plugin.

In the “this week” archive:
http://nysci.wpengine.com/events/week/

There are some past events showing up and they’re all showing the date May 15, even though that’s not their date. Let’s look at one example: GingerBread Lane House Giveaway
http://nysci.wpengine.com/event/gingerbread-lane-house-giveaway/2017-05-15/
Don’t let the URL fool you! The date of this event is Jan 12 2014. If you look at the event edit screen (attached) you’ll see that it is a one day event that was created in July 2013. But it has some new fields in it that weren’t even available back then.

So this event has an event date of a single day, Jan 12 2014, but then it’s listed as repeating daily until Jan 12 2014 (the same day) with two exclusions of two dates in March 2015 when it doesn’t occur. Clearly not something that was intentionally set up by a person (especially since, I think, these fields weren’t available in TEC in 2013). Plus, no one has edited this event recently. Somehow the data got corrupted?

The weird dates on the back-end are curious, but the fact that it is showing up in “this week” is problematic. The two exclusion dates are May 15 and May 16, so maybe that is why they are showing up? But those were dates in 2015. AND they weren’t input by a person!

(If you look at this after May 21, I think the problem won’t show up, but you can jump to this particular week using http://nysci.wpengine.com/events/week/2017-05-15/ )

So the questions are:
1. Why are these events showing up when they are in the past?
2. How did the data for these events get corrupted like this?

Thanks!

[Andras]

Hello nysci,

Thanks for getting in touch with your issue. I’m really sorry this is happening with your events.

The details you gave me above help a lot. I checked and indeed it is unusual.

We are aware of this issue. This happens on occasion unfortunately.

With version 4.4 we have changed how recurring events are handled and some recurring rules are not ported over correctly causing this weird behavior.

Unfortunately there is no workaround for this at the moment, but a fix is being worked on. I will add your thread to the ticket to give it more push.

The only thing you can do is to manually edit the faulty events and set the rules right.

I’m sorry again that you are having this trouble.

I am going to set the status of this ticket to “pending fix” and we will update it once the fix is released. If you have any new questions or issues please create a new ticket and we’ll be glad to help.

Thanks and cheers,
Andras

[nysci]

Thanks for the info, Andras.

While we are waiting for a fix, can you give me a suggestion of how to mass-discover which events we might have that are affected by this? I can run an SQL search, if you give me an idea of what to look for; that is, what these past events might share in common so that I can identify them. I’d like to fix them individually, but don’t know which events are affected.

[Andras]

That might be difficult to execute. It can very well be – and likely that’s the case – that all the recurring events are affected by this.

Depending on how you mean to fix them, in the database event data is saved in the wp_posts and the wp_postmeta tables.

The main data is in wp_posts and the recurrences have the ID of the main event in the post_parent column.

Or if you want to work in the WordPress backend, then you can try our free Advanced Post Manager plugin, which will help you sort and filter your events in different ways, including whether it is recurring or not.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Andras

[nysci]

The problem appears to be even worse than we’d realized!

It seems to be that when we edit events from the past (even non-reoccurring events) they save as recurring events and they create new reoccurring events of that one event post for months in the past. We just realized that today while we were correcting some old links and adding tags.

Please tell me that a fix is imminent!

[Andras]

Hello nysci,

The fix went out with this weeks updates. Updating all the plugins to the latest versions should help you with this issue.

Please note that it does not support ‘custom’ type rules created with 4.3.4 or earlier: these may or may not work and have glitches in some cases.

Also, if you did some changes to some events before the update, might not affect those.

Please let us know how the update / fix works out, we would very much welcome the feedback.

Thanks,
Andras

[Nico]

Hey,

Just wanted to share with you that a new maintenance release (for the Week of 12th June 2017) is out, including a fix for this issue ?

Find out more about this release → https://theeventscalendar.com/maintenance-release-for-the-week-of-12th-june-2017/

Please update the plugins and let us know if the fix works for your site,
Best,
Nico

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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