Sorry, Still Creating Duplicates, now only pulling 2 events

[Daniel]

Happy Monday! I installed the Events Calendar with iCal Importer for my client a number of months ago. Just doing a really simple daily import of any new events added to their church calendar. Everything worked well for a while, but suddenly calendar events were all being imported as doubled, and the latest import had failed completely.

Duplicate Events ical Import

I’ve read the above topic, and was excited that there may be a solution to my problem –

I went to go check for an update and noticed iCal 4.0.3 (WordPress is 4.4.2, Events Calendar is 4.0.6) – I completely removed the plugin, deleted the files via FTP, re-downloaded from your site, and reinstalled. Before doing this, my ical link was pulling in 22 events, and then when selecting ‘import’ they suddenly became duplicated.

Now, after the reinstall, the SAME link is only pulling up 2 events…nothing has changed about the feed whatsoever, and while I could have handled doing manual imports, I’ve now deleted all the events in order to ‘start over’ and can’t get more than 2 of them back…

webcal://plattparkchurch.ccbchurch.com/w_calendar_sub.ics

Please help me inform my client on the likelihood of repairing this!

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Daniel and welcome back!

Thank you for reaching out to us.

We are sorry to hear about the duplicate event imports.
I would love to help you with this topic.

To answer your question, the likelihood of repairing this is very good. But, to set expectations, it might require a bit of back and forth to make sure we leave no stone unturned.
I am able to say this because using the iCal link you provided, I was able to import 25 events (starting as of February 1st 2016), with no duplicates whatsoever 🙂

What is going on is that there is actually a built-in function that prevents you from reimporting the events twice, even after they are “deleted”.
In reality, they are still present in the Database when you delete them from the backend.

This leaves us with 2 options:

1. If you feel confortable with that (and only after you have made a backup), you could delete the events directly in the Database (the simplest and fastest option)
2. If you do not feel confortable with this, let me know and I’ll prepare instructions for a different approach.

Let me know what you prefer,

Have a great day!

Geoff B.

 

[Daniel]

Thanks for your timely response.

I went through phpMyAdmin and deleted all items under the post type ‘Deleted Event’

I then set up the weekly import, was told 22 events would be imported, however over 300 events were imported – an incredible number of duplicates now!

Suggestions?

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Daniel,

Hmm, it sounds like you might have deleted too many of them (you probably deleted ALL deleted items instead of just the ones that were of interest to you).
Either that or there is some kind of issue with the link between existing events and what you deleted. In any case, I’m very sorry to hear that.

Out of curiosity, when you reimported the ics file, did you specify a start date ? And if so, which one ?

As per your question, if you did in fact follow my suggestion of doing a backup, here’s how I would handle it (the choice is really up to you):

1. Restore the backed up DB and remove only the deleted events for the period that is of interest to you using a post revision plugin such as: https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-delete-revision/
2. You could also run our duplicator cleanup plugin as an alternative of re-installing from the backup: https://slack-files.com/T0258N5TN-F028ZJ8UX-e7dc80d4e0
3. Manually delete the duplicates.

Let me know how that goes.

Best regards,
Geoff B.

 

 

[Daniel]

Geoff,

I’m a little confused by your reply – I did, indeed, intend to delete all the events.

I then attempted to re-import them, and expected your iCall import to work as advertised and to import all the events correctly. Instead, it imported events with not just duplicates, but many are tripled or quadrupled all with the same date!

I imported starting with that day’s date.

I can’t imagine why I’d go through and delete just the duplicates, when my point for posting is to ask that the importer be fixed so that I don’t need to go through an delete a bunch of posts every time the feed imports.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 1 month ago by Daniel.

[Daniel]

If I do a 1-time import, I get the correct 22 events.

If I do a daily import, I get almost 500 with duplicates.

Each event goes to a 404

http://www.plattparkchurch.org/calendar/-event/childrens-classes-113/

[Geoff B.]

Good afternoon Daniel,

First of all, I am so sorry if my answer caused any confusion.
This was certainly not my intention.

I would love to try to clarify what I meant:

Making changes in the DB directly has risks (especially when it comes to deleting entries).

It does not take much to unintentionally delete something that “holds everything else together”. This is why I suggested reverting back to the DB backup and trying to perform the removal using a plugin or snippet instead.

The good news is that I have bumped into additional tools (if we need them) to do just that since our conversation began.

If I do a 1-time import, I get the correct 22 events.

If I do a daily import, I get almost 500 with duplicates.

Each event goes to a 404

http://www.plattparkchurch.org/calendar/-event/childrens-classes-113/

Oh dear, this must be terrible to experience. Once again, we apologize for all the inconvenience caused by the attempts to correct the initial issue.

Hopefully we can iron out all of these things quickly so that we can go back to business as usual.

In that spirit, I went ahead and tested things out on my local install.
And I was able to reproduce the escalating number of imported events 🙁

Digging a bit deeper into it, I opened up the .ics files generated by the <span class=”s1″>Church Community Builder product you are using to generate the ics feed.
The issue is that each time the feed is downloaded, the unique IDs for each event are changed!</span>

As such, our plugin is unable to recognize events as being the same and thus treat them as new ones.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it does look like the only solution would be to change this behaviour at the source (how the ICS file is being generated).

Let me know how that goes.

Best regards,
Geoff B.

[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]

Posts