Recurring Events on the same day many times over

[crystalbridges]

I am having problems with recurring events duplicating events on the same day, sometimes as many as 25 or more for a single date. Some of my events now have over 1000 instances.

Every time I open one of these recurring event series, it appears to be still executing and says “Recurring event data is still being generated for this event. Don’t worry, you can safely navigate away – the process will resume in a bit in the background.” And it adds to the event count.

I have tried deleting them manually, but it’s too big of a job.

I also tried the tribe cleanup plugin, but it brings up an error before it starts.

[crystalbridges]

I have read the other forum posts about issues with recurring event problems, and have found nothing outside of running the cleanup plugin. I have attached an image of the error.

[Brook]

Howdy crystalbridges,

I would love to help you with this. Sorry this is giving you such trouble. 🙁 The cleanup plugin you mention was designed for a bug that existed briefly in 2014, and would not really be helpful here.

I am not at all sure why you are seeing so many duplicates. There are a few possibilities: a conflicting plugin (that was active when the process first started), a misconfigured event, a currently unknown and extremely rare bug in our plugins. Regardless of why this is happening let’s first focus on stopping it from continuing, then cleaning up what it’s created. Simply doing this might stop it from misbehaving in the future.

First go to WP Admin > Events and you will be greeted with a list of events. Find one of the misbehaving events and click the Edit All button. Can you change the Recurrence Rules to None and hit Update ? Or is it locking up on this page?

If it is locking up, look at the URL for that page. It will be something like “http://example.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=123&action=edit” . Make a note of the post= number, in this case it’s 123. Now you will need to run a SQL query to rapidly delete all recurrences for this event, which will hopefully stop the page from locking up. Checkout this SQL query:

https://gist.github.com/elimn/e5de5d2037678de0b926c307022571c5

Can you run through the steps outlined in it for this event? That should delete all recurrences for the event. Do this for each event series that is malfunctioning, and it should rapidly cleanup your database of the duplicates.

Now your database is clean. If you try modifying one of those existing events, setting a recurrence rule, and hitting Update, what happens? Does it spawn duplicates you did not anticipate, or does it work as expected?

Sorry again for this inconvenience. Hopefully I can help you get to the bottom of this right quick. Cheers!

– Brook

[crystalbridges]

Thanks for the response. I actually dug in and deleted all of the recurring events and recreated them with a shorter end date to see what would happen. So far there are no problems. If it recurs, I will refer to the query and insructions you posted.

Cheers

[Brook]

That was a good plan. I have seen these run amok once or twice but so far it has not been a recurring issue for people that saw it one time. This very likely seems like an extraordinarily rare circumstance that causes it to happen, perhaps like a server reboot or something while it’s still adding recurrences? Who knows.

I’ll leave this topic open for a couple of weeks though just in case it crops up again. Thanks for getting back!

• Brook

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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