Random duplicates with Google Calendar importing

[stonewallcolumbus]

We have a very large Google calendar we are using with the Events Aggregator and previously the iCal importer.

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/[email protected]/public/basic.ics

After updating the Events Calendar Pro release this past week, we had duplicate events. This calendar is very large with over 1,500 events, many of them recurring events. There were some random duplication with events, especially at the beginning of the list.

I couldn’t afford to wait 48 hours for a response and had to work on the weekend with this. We imported the site to a staging environment on WP Engine.

In Staging: All plugins were deactivated, theme switched to 2016. Importing process started again with a daily scheduled event and duplicate events for the first few dates of February. We deleted all the 1,500+ dates that were imported (wish we could disable ignored events or have an “empty trash” equivalent.) Made a new schedule import, finally was a clean import without duplicates. This took 4-5 pulls to test.

We had similar recurring problems with the iCal importer plugin although that put all recurring dates on the same day as the state date. This has been very fussy and we may have to drop using this process because we can’t rely on the plugin having been thoroughly tested for Google Calendar imports.

There doesn’t seem to be enough testing going on for imports prior to upgrades. We need Google Calendar so we are looking for an alternative stable solution.

[Andras]

Hello stonewallcolumbus,

Thanks for using our plugins and welcome to the forums!

I’m really sorry about this issue with duplicate events when importing from Google Calendar. I’ll try to help you get to the bottom of this.

Do I understand correctly that there were imports when duplication didn’t happen?

Was there anything done differently in those cases? Were the import settings any different than before?

What was / is the status set to, when importing? Draft, published, …?

Were the events changed in Google Calendar before re-importing? If yes, how?

Looking forward to helping you with this.

Cheers,
Andras

 

 

[stonewallcolumbus]

“Do I understand correctly that there were imports when duplication didn’t happen?”
Yes, it has been working with daily imports without duplication for recurring events until the last update to The Events Calendar Pro last week.

“Was there anything done differently in those cases? Were the import settings any different than before?”
No change in settings, scheduled daily import.

“What was / is the status set to, when importing? Draft, published, …?
https://cloudup.com/cM8-jwFm4UV”
Status is set to “Publish” when importing because of the large volume for events, it isn’t practical to review.

“Were the events changed in Google Calendar before re-importing? If yes, how?”
I deleted all of the 1,500+ imported events and deleted the schedule for daily imports. Created a new schedule for daily imports (it is a busy facility and there are changes sometimes on the schedule.) Now it is a clean import with no duplicates so far. Since the plugin does not delete events if there are changes on the original, this was the only way to ensure no duplicates.

[Andras]

Hello again,

Sorry, I’m a bit confused now. Are you still experiencing the duplicating issue or it seems to be solved?

On testing, I can assure you that all of our plugins go through thorough testing before they are released. However, due to the multitude of different environments (servers, plugins, themes and calendars / calendar feeds) it is impossible to test every scenario. Thankfully our users help us a lot in finding and squishing bugs.

Let me know if you are still experiencing the issue and I’ll be more than happy to help.

Cheers,
Andras

[stonewallcolumbus]

Hi Andras,

We solved the issue ourselves. As previously mentioned, since the upgrade, the daily schedule no longer was working properly and for recurring dates causing some duplication on the same day. To fix this, we deleted all of the dates from the Google Calendar import, deleted the daily schedule (which no longer could properly pull in correctly after the upgrade) and created a new daily schedule to import from Google Calendar.

Our system setup is not that unique. We use WP Engine, Genesis themes, and we stay on top of updates. We have issues with the google calendar imports. We are doing staging pulls before implementing updates. For us, upgrades of the plugin are problematic, maybe because of the high volume of calendar date importing.

[Andras]

Hi stonewallcolumbus,

I am glad to see you were able to solve the issue. And I’m happy to see you are doing everything on a staging server before. Not too many people do that.

Since it is marked resolved I am going to go ahead and close this ticket. If you have a similar issue or another in the future, please do not hesitate to create a new ticket. We’ll be happy to help.

Cheers,
Andras

PS: If you like our plugins, and you didn’t yet do so 🙂 we would be happy to receive a review in the wordpress.org repository. Thanks!
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/the-events-calendar/reviews/

PS2: We’d be also grateful if you would give us feedback on your satisfaction with support. Just click on one of the classy looking emojis below. 🙂 If you can spare a few words, that’s even better. Doublethanks!

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