iCal sync creates loads of duplicate events

[Mikko Wahlroos]

Hello,

I’ve got a problem where the sync function creates loads of duplicate posts and sets them all as drafts. It’s been working for a week or so, and now we’ve got over 10k draft posts of same three or four events 😀

I don’t even know where to start looking for a solution for this. We have few different feeds importing, but they all are from same software and seem to do the same thing. Here’s a link to one of the feeds we’re using:

https://wellsheffield.churchapp.co.uk/ical/Mikko-8yyHbBlcywhEUM0HLq6n-4.ics

Thanks for any help 🙂

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Mikko,

The plug-in will search for existing events by their UID (supplied in the feed) to see if it has already been imported. If so, it won’t create a new event but update the existing one. So from what you describe, it would seem that it is not finding the events.

It should then delete events not found in the feed, but again, if it is not finding the events, nothing will be deleted.

I have seen this before when a memberships/permissions plug-in was activated which (incorrectly) applied restrictions on cron jobs. The issue is that the sync happens using a cron job (or WordPress’ pseudo-cron) – but in such circumstances there is no ‘logged in user’. Some membership/permissions plugins will apply their restrictions associated to logged-out users and thus the routine won’t find any events as it’s ‘not allowed to’.

If you disable any other plug-ins and allow the sync to run that will help identify any potential plug-ins (or you can take an educated guess based on the plug-ins you have activated).

If you manually sync the feed, does that ‘clean up’ the events?

Also, in the example feed you have ‘Cafe time’ 26 times (it looks like each individual occurrence is listed) – I assume this is deliberate and certainly wouldn’t explain the magnitude of duplicates you’re seeing.

[Mikko Wahlroos]

Hi Stephen,

I think the problem was I hadn’t chosen ‘Published’ on the Event status dropdown while adding the feed. I added another feed with this setting and those don’t seem to duplicate… The duplicated items were shown as Drafts, I had left the setting on ‘Use status specified in feed’. The feed doesn’t seem to have a specified status for events anyway. Oops.

Thanks for your help, it seems to work now.

[Mikko Wahlroos]

I was too quick to judge, it’s still doing it. Now though, when I refresh the feed, it gets rid of excess events. I’m not using any membership/capability plugins. I also deactivated backup and cache plugins..

• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by  Mikko Wahlroos.

[Mikko Wahlroos]

Hi Stephen,

unfortunately the plugin is still creating a set of duplicates every time the sync runs. Also as a new thing I noticed the description field has a lot of escaped characters visible (i.e. \r and \’). It seems to add a new row after \r but leaves it in the text.

Unfortunately I can’t use the plugin on the site as it doesn’t seem to work properly… Would you have any further ideas to try?

[Stephen Harris]

The issue with \r could be an encoding issue, which was fixed in the latest version. In any case, I wasn’t able to replicate this using the above iCal feed. Is there a particular example of an event doing this?

As for duplication of events, does manually (as an admin) fetching events correct this? If so, that indicates a permission issue for retrieving/deleting events when running the cron job.

It seems likely that there is a plug-in/theme conflict. One way of determining this is to disable all other plug-ins and manually fetch the feed.

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