The new update interferes with comments showing on my website

[Kathy Voth]

I’m running The Daily Press theme by The Molitor. After updating to the most recent version of Events Calendar, the comments disappeared from my site. I disabled all the most recently updated plug-ins and then reactivated them one by one. Comments disappeared again when I reactivated Events Calendar. I could be wrong, but I think that makes it the problem. I also have Events Tickets and Community Events plug-ins. They don’t seem to cause problems.

I’m concerned about deactivating all plug-ins. Reverting to the 2014 theme is not an option.

[Caroline]

Hi Kathy,

Thanks for reaching out, and I’m so sorry to hear you’re having problems with comments on your site! We’d definitely like to investigate further to see if we can’t get things working here.

Unfortunately, if you’re unable to test even briefly with a default WordPress theme or duplicate your site onto a staging environment to complete conflict testing, our options for troubleshooting may be somewhat limited. That said, would you be willing to share a link to an affected page of your site so that we might take a closer look?

Also, would you be so kind as to confirm whether you’re using any additional plugins to power your comments (i.e. Jetpack, Disqus, etc.)?

Thanks, and we’ll see where we can go from here!

[Kathy Voth]

I’m happy to duplicate my site onto a staging environment, but I don’t know how to do that. If you have instructions I could follow, I will try. But switching to another theme otherwise is a no go. This is a news site and readers are accessing it at all times of the day and night.

I do have Jetpack on my site, but it is not being used to power the comments. Because I’ve deactivated the Events Calendar, none of the pages are affected any longer. Readers were upset that the comments had disappeared, especially one who is a high dollar contributor, so deactivation seemed like a good idea.

I read that the conflict testing involves deactivating all plug-ins except for the Events Calendar and then activating plug-ins one at a time to see if there is a conflict between Events Calendar and another plug-in. I think that’s something I can do without too much disruption. I have a question about this though. If I activate one plug-in and everything remains ok, do I leave it on as I activate additional plug-ins?

[Kathy Voth]

My website is onpasture.com.

[Caroline]

Hi Kathy,

Thanks for following up! We definitely encourage all of our users to work with staging sites before deploying significant changes or product updates to their live sites–if you’re interested in setting up a staging environment for your own site, you can read more about how to do so here. A number of options are available depending on your time, budget, and technical savvy, but in general it’s a great thing to have, especially when you’re working with well-trafficked sites!

For now, if you’re able to move forward with conflict testing for just plugins, that information would be a great help to us! You’ll want to test each plugin one at a time without any other plugins active, even if the previous plugin tested without issues. This will allow us to isolate any unusual behavior to a specific culprit, and we can provide more targeted solutions accordingly.

Let me know if you should have any questions about setting up a staging site or moving forward with plugin conflict testing at this time! 🙂 Thanks for your patience as we work to get things back on track for you here!

[Kathy Voth]

Thanks for your help, Caroline. Still, I have a problem with this process. I’m not sure why I have to test every single one of my plug-ins individually. Everything was working great until I updated to the most recent Event Calendar. When I deactivated the ones that I’d just updated, and then tested them one at a time, the culprit was Event Calendar. Testing all of my existing plug-ins one at a time is a lot of time for me, when my real job is writing content and making sure that readers have something to read. So far it looks like I’m doing all the work in figuring out the problem with your product. What is there in this that will make me happy?

I would really like to be able to talk to a live person. I am happy to give you my phone number if you would like to give me a call.

[Kathy Voth]

Here is a list of my current plug-ins to help with this issue:
Ads by datafeedr.com 1.0.11
Akismet 3.2
Another wordpress Classifieds Plugin (AWPCP) 3.7.1
AWPCP Featured Ads Premium Module 3.5
Columns 0.7.3
Contact Form 7 4.6
Easy Columns 2.1.3
Facebook like box 2.8.8
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP 4.9.5
Jetpack by WordPress.com 4.4.2
Really Simple CAPTCHA 1.9
The Events Calendar 4.4.0.1 (Deactivated)
The Events Calendar 4.4
Wordfence Assistant 1.0.3
Wordfence Security 6.2.9
WP Super Cache 1.4.8
Interestingly, I changed the name of the events calendar link, and now the events calendar shows up, even though the plug-in isn’t active. The Community Events Calendar link does not show up and links to an old page. So I removed it and saved the code elsewhere.

[Caroline]

Hi Kathy,

I certainly understand your grievances here, and I’m so sorry for the continued frustration. As many of us here on support are web professionals ourselves, we definitely empathize with the aggravation that comes when a live site feature isn’t performing as expected!

We do our best to provide the highest quality of support we’re able with limited resources–as our users are a large and diverse group, each with entirely unique sites and configuration settings, we depend on users assisting with troubleshooting and sharing their insights so we can identify specific issues more readily. An issue that appears to be isolated to one plugin can in actuality be triggered by conflicting code in a separate plugin or theme, and conflict testing helps us to eliminate these factors so we’re focusing our greatest efforts toward legitimate bugs. (For issues we are able to pin on specific conflicts, we can often use the source of the conflict as a reference point for adjusting our own code, or we can communicate with other developers to ensure their products use best practices for broad compatibility. Either way, it’s a win-win!)

Unfortunately, as we operate entirely as a distributed company, we do not maintain dedicated lines for phone sales or support–all of our premium support services are provided exclusively through these forums. You can read more about our support terms, what services we provide, and what types of issues are covered on our Knowledgebase here. We do underscore the importance of following our troubleshooting steps, as it’s often the only way we can provide solutions for problems like the one you’re experiencing. We do hope you’ll reconsider working with us on this issue, as we’d certainly like to address your problems and get you back to writing and communicating with your users! 🙂

As a last resort, if you’d prefer not to continue seeking support for your issues, you can downgrade to the last known version of our products that worked on your site. While we definitely encourage our users to use the most up-to-date versions of our plugins, you always have the option to move back. You can find instructions on how to downgrade your plugins on our Knowledgebase here.

Again, I’m truly sorry for the difficulties you’re experienced here, and I regret that we aren’t able to do more to assist at this time. That said, please let us know if there’s anything else we can do for you here–we’d love the opportunity to make things right if we can. Thanks so much!

[Kathy Voth]

Looks like I’ll downgrade. If I delete Events Calendar, do I lose all the events that were already on the calendar?

[Caroline]

Hi Kathy,

No worries–your events and plugin settings are stored in your WordPress database along with your posts and pages, and changes made to the plugin files and folders themselves won’t affect these in any way. Please feel free to downgrade, upgrade, or delete plugins as needed. Your events will be right where you left them when you return!

Thanks, and please don’t hesitate to follow up if there’s anything else we can do to assist!

[Kathy Voth]

It’s working again since I downgraded to 4.3.5 in Events Calendar and to 4.3.2 in Community Events. But the issue with the update remains unresolved. I hope that someone there will eventually look into this and fix the problem.

[Caroline]

Hi Kathy,

Thanks for following up to confirm that downgrading was successful in correcting your problem. Our development team is investigating similar reports of issues with comments in version 4.4–while we’re not able to confirm that these are related to what you experienced, we’re definitely working towards addressing these problems in our next maintenance release. I’ll go ahead and add your thread to our list of reports, and one of our team members will follow up with you once a fix for these issues (and possibly yours) is available to download.

Thanks again, and please don’t hesitate to let us know if there’s anything else we can do for you!

[Kathy Voth]

I notice that there have been some additional updates to the Events Calendar. Can you tell me if they address the issue I was having with comments disappearing? If not, I’ll just stick with my older version.

Thanks!

[Caroline]

Hi Kathy,

Thanks for following up! We have indeed received reports from some affected users that 4.4.1.x fixes this issue! I’d suggest backing up your current site configuration before updating (I recommend UpdraftPlus for handling WordPress backups), then installing the latest update whenever you’re ready. If any issues should occur after the update, you’ll have a known good copy of your site and plugins to roll back to. 🙂 Let us know if you should have any questions or concerns before or during the process!

[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

[Author]

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