Recurring Events Issues

[Janet]

Hello,

My client may have inadvertently edited or add new events with recurring dates in a manner that all went haywire.
There are now 193 events on date 5/16 and 225 events on 5/23. I went in to try and clean up by removing the recurring events but when I try to save a get a server error. I increased the PHP limit 256M to no avail. Also removed calendar cache. Can you please give me a tip in order to resolve this. How can I remove these events or change them to ‘non-recurring’.= without crashing the server. Best case scenario would be to delete all the erroneous recurring events and add the event(s) back properly.

Please view calendar > Dates 5/16 and 5/23

Here attached is a screenshot of one of the events on the backend.

[Janet]

Hello Again,

I wanted to provide a bit more information as this sounds like a bug relating to recurring events.
I spoke to the client this morning, he tried to edit a recurring event by changing the time on all future events in the series.
The server crashed and he hit the back button. This is when all the 200+ events appeared on the calendar and everything went haywire. I will rollback the site so by the time you look at this it may be reverted. Please refer to the screenshot attached.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this matter.

Thank you!

Janet

[Josh]

Hey Janet,

Thanks for reaching out to us!

To clarify, your client was trying to update the time on all occurrences of an event and the connection was lost or something timed out and when they refreshed there were a couple hundred versions of the event on the same date?

Out of curiosity, after this, did the future events still exist or were all instances now on the single day? Also, how many original instances of the event were there?

I ask because I’m curious about whether this could possibly be a duplication bug or a problem with the future events dates resetting to the date of the next instance but not actually duplicating the events.

Thanks!

[Janet]

Hi Josh,

Yes, my client was trying to change the time on all future events. After hitting save he got the spinning wheel and then got a server 500 error. After this the 200+ instances of the event appeared.
I tried to delete them but got a server error each time. (Even increased the php memory to 256M to no avail, so we did a rollback). Here attached again is the edit view of the event (from my first post).

[Josh]

Hey Janet,

I apologize for my continued confusion here. The screenshot you attached above where it lists the exclusions for the recurring event, is that of the event after it was duplicated due to the date change attempt and subsequent timeout? It looks to be broken due to the number of exclusions included there on the same date (8/1) however I don’t see mention of that particular element in your descriptions above.

Also, now that you’ve done a rollback, are the timeouts still occurring if you were to try and delete events from your calendar?

Thanks!

[Janet]

Sorry for the delay in my reply… The same issue has happened again. My client changed the end date of a recurring event and the event has now multiplied. The site appears to be running slower as a result. Client reports when he hit save, he got a spinning ball for awhile and then a server error. Upon refresh the event was updated but also multiplied.

I see there is now another post with a similar issue, though much more extreme.

2 Recurring Events have multiplied into 50-150 per day

Screenshots attached. Please advise at your earliest convenience. This is the height of their season so it’s super imperative that we get this resolved asap.

Many thanks!

[Janet]

This reply is private.

[Janet]

Hello checking in on the post above. I’d like to delete the problematic recurring event described above but I wanted to wait for your response and recommendation.

Looking forward to your response.

Thank you.

[Janet]

Hello again. We are having a serious issue with the plugin and I’m surprised by the lack of response from your team.

As stated previously we have over 300 instances of a recurring event. It is not possible to edit to non-recurring or delete them without a server crash. Please see attached screenshots.

The site is incredibly slow. We just launched and in the midst of a busy season.

Please provide some support on how to resolve this matter asap.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 10 months ago by Janet.

[Janet]

This reply is private.

[Janet]

Hello.

I just found this duplicate clean up plugin.
https://theeventscalendar.com/release-events-calendar-pro-3-5-2-hotfix/

Is this still a valid solution?

[Janet]

Please get in touch with me regarding this issue. About to rollback to launch point. Enormous task.

[Josh]

Hey Janet,

I’m terribly sorry for the delay here.

I would suggest that you go ahead and delete the problematic event. I don’t believe that cleanup tool that we had for a previous version of the plugin will work for this particular issue.

Could you send me the exact set up of how the event is intended to be created? Getting the event dates, recurrence settings, and exclusion settings for how the event is supposed to be created will help to test and try to see if I can recreate the issue.

Looking at some of the original screenshots, the set up for the events seem quite odd. There are exclusions specifically defined for the event however, the recurrence settings wouldn’t have the event on that day anyway.

Thanks!

 

[Josh]

Hey Janet,

Something else that may help here as well would be to also send a backup of your current database for the site. Here is a great walkthrough on how to manage that.  You can send that to support[at]theeventscalendar.com and request to have it forwarded to me.

This will give me a much better picture of what is happening here and possibly clean up the files for a re-import and fresh start on the event.

Thanks!

[Janet]

Hi Josh,

Just to follow up. I resorted to a full rollback and manually added back all my client’s changes to bring the site up to speed. Needless to say this was quite a chore.

Bottom line is the duplicated events could not be deleted on the front end. (They were deleted on the backend, only at certain times when the server did not crash, but would still display on the calendar).

My theory is this may have something to do with the Dropbox backup and restore plugin. Shortly after launch I installed this plugin, and quickly noticed odd behavior as the plugin kept on making backups. After reading a bit about this ‘background’ behavior I quickly uninstalled.

As stated earlier my client edited the end date of a recurring event which caused everything to go haywire. Suddenly multiple copies of the recurring event appeared and I could not delete without a server error (this is what leads me to believe there is a tie to the formerly installed Dropbox plugin).

With the fresh rollback we are absolutely NOT using recurring events until I am certain this will never happen again.

I will email a copy of the ‘bad’ database. Would love to get your feedback on this.
And would love to be feel safe using recurring events as it’s incredibly time consuming to manually duplicate single events.

Please keep me posted on your findings.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 9 months ago by Janet.
• This reply was modified 9 years, 9 months ago by Janet.

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