[Plugin: The Events Calendar] Plugin adding bogus events to event list

Hey there zarathos. Thanks for reaching out; this is the first of such issues I’ve encountered. Are you saying you never entered those problematic events (the July 19 one, for example) and that they just existed on your site since you booted up the plugin?

Couple of things to check here, if so. First would be to make sure you don’t have another custom post type on your site called ‘events’, which would lead to a conflict along these lines. If that doesn’t do the trick – are you in a position where you can test deactivating your other plugins one-by-one, until just The Events Calendar is active, to see if this is a plugin conflict? If so that’d be helpful in troubleshooting this.

As far as I know, it’s been doing this since day one (which is strange, because we have it on another site where we don’t have this issue). And the only actual event listed in the plugin admin is the January 2013 one.

We’re not running any custom post types, and the only other plugins running on the site are Akismet, Bad Behavior, TinyMCE Enhanced, and WP Remote, none of which changed anything when I disabled them.

Thanks for the follow-up, Zarathos, and apologies that it took me until now to get back to you. (August is a slow month for us as much of the team takes vacation during these few weeks, so we slow down and haven’t been hitting the forum here as often). We’re getting back up to full speed and I wanted to check back in on this one.

That’s really odd, as we don’t build the plugin to contain any dummy content and you’re the first person to report it doing so. Might you have had an earlier (pre-2.0) version of the plugin active that could have been responsible for creating those entries in the past? If there has ever been an event added to the database using our plugin, and it wasn’t deleted, it’d show up again when you installed a new build.

Let me know if you think that could be responsible or if this is still problematic for you, and we can keep looking as needed. Thanks again for your patience so far.

I don’t think it’s dummy content, simply from the fact that dates change to reflect the loading time of the page. For example, my machine currently shows the time as 8:51 PM (CDT) August 20. When I load the events list page, it shows the bogus events with a start and end date of August 20th, 2012 9:51 PM (EDT, our server is hosted in Atlanta, and the client is in New York).

See screenshot here: https://o7.no/NZHeUM

And it will do this repeatably on every reload of the page.

I have been through the database with a fine-toothed comb, and can’t find anything that would cause this issue.

Dang – thanks for confirming as much. I’m pretty stumped as to what could be causing this; would you mind letting us take a look at the backend of the site? We won’t change anything, but it’d be helpful to see what’s going on behind the scenes. I think it’d help us figure out a resolution to this.

If you’re game, shoot us over an email (to pro a/ tri.be) with a reference to this thread and a set of admin creds. We’ll take a look and will follow-up here on the forum from there. Thanks!

Just sent you an email. Thanks.

Alright awesome; thanks for sending this over. Just confirmed as much via email as well but I am seeing this and have asked a member of our dev team to take a look – this is a new one to me, though hopefully we can get it taken care of.

Please leave those credentials active for now and we’ll take a look, then respond here once we know more. Thanks for your patience so far.

Hi Zarathos,

Question: are the past dummy events always showing as today’s date? Right now the date is showing as 8/23 (today). Does this change or stay the same?

Thanks,
– Jonah

It always changes. If you were to wait (for example) an hour, and refresh the page, the start and end times would show today’s date with whatever time you loaded the page.

Weird. Ok, I’m going to have to get one of the other devs in to take a look. Stay tuned.

Thanks,
Jonah

Hey again Zarathos. I realize you’ve probably moved on by now, and apologies for the delay in getting you a response here. Our dev Paul finally did have a substantive chunk of time to look into this. Upon doing so he’s pretty convinced that – due to the fact that this is just a single example of the situation – something else specific to the theme could be at play here.

If you can provide us with a database dump, we can take a look and see if anything else jumps out. But this does seem to be a byproduct of some element of the theme not playing nicely with The Events Calendar. With all this in mind, let us know how you’d like to proceed. Thanks again for your patience.

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner…I was off on vacation, and just got back last night. I’ll try to grab you a database dump today and email it over.

No worries Keith. Just following up here (and on my email) to confirm we’re still kind of stuck on this; it is on the radar and we are doing our best to make sure we get an answer one way or another this week. Thanks again for your patience.

Hey again Keith. Just wanted to follow-up on this; after loading up the DB, our lead dev is still unable to recreate…all seems well. Sorry to say that we are sort of at a loss regarding how to proceed. Maybe kill the DB and re-import, if you’re in a position to do so? Do you have any other leads to go off of? I’m sorry I – and my team – can’t be of more help.

I’m not surprised…the way my luck goes, if there’s an oddball problem that no one has ever encountered before, I’m gonna be the guy who finds it. ??

Thanks for all your help. You guys went above and beyond on this, and I appreciate it.