Receiving Many Failed Imports

[Neil Duckett]

Starting new thread as requested. My scheduled import list and history reports a lot of errors. If i manually do the import then events come in .. but overall there’s 80% failure rate if i don’t intervene.

Screen shots and system info in next message.

[Neil Duckett]

This reply is private.

[Andras]

This reply is private.

[Andras]

This reply is private.

[Neil Duckett]

Thanks – just checked and there’s a fresh 6 pages of these errors. I’ve updated to 4.3.2 in an attempt to get something working.

[Andras]

Hello Neil,

My colleague took a look and it looks like this is a bug on our servers.

I filed an internal bug ticket for this now, I believe it is going to be above normal priority, but I cannot confirm or commit anything at this moment.

I’m really sorry about this. I hope the fix will make it to one of the next maintenance releases. I will set this thread as a pending fix and will update it as soon as I have more information or a fix is released, so you will get informed.

For the time being the only workaround is doing the update manually. Potentially to use the legacy Facebook importer plugin.

Let me know if I can help with anything else.

Cheers,
Andras

[Neil Duckett]

Thanks Andras, this isn’t directed at your personally – i feel for you support guys having to deal with this situation, but the powers that be at Modern Tribe need some feedback.

What was such a great solution is turning into something quote woeful. I fail to see how anyone has been able to use this without having multiple issues?! And trying to say this was beta tested on 500 users is an insult to the communities intelligence.

While i need not name them all, I’ve gone from having a neat and tidy calendar of events to an absolute shambles – duplicate events, no google map, events not created with an organiser and about a 20% import success … the list goes on. On top of that, the actual tool is missing some basic functionality for example, the ability to easily see which new events have been imported. The solution to set new events to “Pending” isn’t valid … i did that and it only works for new imports, the already scheduled ones that are set to published aren’t over ridden by that setting!

Editing the scheduled imports is cumbersome at best with no way of searching and no way of doing a quick edit.

The sooner this is fixed the better, and considering the impact to many i’m expecting it this week.

Thanks.

[Andras]

Hello Neil,

I am truly very sorry for writing you a reply after so much time. Because the ticket is set to pending fix I overlooked that it had a new post from you. I apologize, that’s my bad, and it taught me a lesson.

I want to thank you for your feedback, it is very much appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to give voice your concerns and frustrations. Feedback like yours is really important to us, it gives us a reality check; we can see what works, what our users like or don’t like. And at the end will help us make better products.

The launch of Event Aggregator was successful, though not without issues and bugs. Due to the multitude of different environments, setups and working conditions it is simply impossible to test every scenario, so unfortunately issues appear, no matter how thoroughly we test everything. And I can assure you that our QA team is giving the developers a real hard time. 🙂

It is unfortunate that you are having these serious issues with the service. We don’t know yet what could be the cause and so far there was only one other report of this happening. We have a bugticket on file and our developers will definitely look into the issue.

As for your feedback, I already flagged it to my manager, and will share it with the EA team as well.

In the meantime, I would like to urge you to submit your suggestions on our UserVoice page. If a feature request there gets enough votes, it will become a core functionality of the plugin. You can search through the repo so see if anybody suggested something similar that you want and vote on that, or you can create a new recommendation.
http://tribe.uservoice.com/

Again, apologies for the troubles you had to endure so far and thank you for your honest feedback.

I will be in touch as soon as we have a fix for the issue.

Thanks and cheers,
Andras

[Geoff]

Hi Neil,

My name is Geoff and I head up support here for The Events Calendar. Andras shared this thread with me and I wanted to take an opportunity to reach out directly because you raise valid points in here and I want to assure you they have not fallen on deaf ears or are being swept under the carpet.

There is no excuse for the legitimate issue you noted about automatic Facebook imports not working in some cases. I have confirmed with our development team that this appears to be an issue not so much with Event Aggregator, but the server it is on. Needless to say, we have an open ticket to look into this and it’s something we absolutely want to address as soon as possible, once we’ve pinpointed the exact issue. I unfortunately do not have a concrete date for when a fix will officially roll out, you can be absolutely certain that it is being looked at and that we will follow up with you directly as we learn more. If this is indeed a server issue, then we’ll be more likely to roll something out sooner than if we had to make change to the core plugin for an official release.

You also brought up fair and helpful ideas for possible features to include. While I cannot guarantee that things like creating and assigning organizers and venues to imported events is something that will be included in future releases, we’d love to keep the conversation open on them and get your additional feedback as we spec future releases of Event Aggregator.

As Andras has already mentioned, I really do appreciate you hanging with us while we work on the issue you reported and I hope you’ll continue to give us a chance to do right by you as we continue to build and improve upon Event Aggregator.

Sincerely,
Geoff

[Neil Duckett]

Hi Andras and Geoff, thanks for the detailed replies.

I eagerly check every day in the hope of seeing an update that will fix the issues we’re having, unfortunately the latest update made things worse with the Facebook event featured image not coming through.

I was quite prepared to manually hit the import button on the relevant pages that i knew would have new events, but doing so and not getting an image is unacceptable.

Our business model relies on the community seeing a vast array of events, all with a featured image, a Google map, assigned to the relevant organise and so on … a certain level of completeness – That entices them to list their events with us and sell tickets where applicable.

With incomplete / duplicate events the calendar looks like a shambles so our business has come to a stand still – we can no promote or engage new event organisers for fear they’ll deem our site incapable of selling tickets with 100% confidence.

I really hope there’s some major improvements and fast.

Thanks,

Neil

[Andras]

Hello Neil,

Thank you for sharing your feedback and concerns with us.

I just want to let you know that the featured-image-bug is being worked on, currently it is pending Quality Assurance. If all goes according to plan, this fix will be released before Christmas.

(As a note, the non-importing of the featured image happens only when Events Calendar Pro is active. If you deactivate Pro, then they should come through.)

I’ll let you know if I have any new updates.

Cheers,
Andras

[Andras]

Hello Neil,

Thanks for hanging in there. Our developers are already working on the issue, and a bit of help / info would be needed from you.

• Could you share some Facebook urls / pages where you are pulling events from?
• How are the scheduled imports set up? Could you share a screenshot or two of that?
• What is your Event Update Authority setting? You can find this under Events > Settings > Import tab and looks like this: https://cloudup.com/cvGYf71lZE2

Thanks in advance, your help is much appreciated!

Cheers,
Andras

[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

[George]

Hello!

I wanted to share the news that we released a Maintenance Release today that should include improved handling of these imports.

You should be able to see this update in your wp-admin Updates page. You can learn more about the release here: https://theeventscalendar.com/maintenance-release-events-calendar-4-4-2-event-tickets-4-4-2-premium-add-ons/

Cheers!
George

[Author]

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