You are already registered for this event

Hi Pete,

There is usually a conflict somewhere. The latest version of the plugin didn’t change the registration function so it could be some other plugin, you theme or even your hosting in conflict.

The reason you are seeing this message is because the form is getting submitted twice. It’s not the QEM doing this, it’s some other trigger. So the way to find out what is to turn off all other plugins and try again. If the form now works activate each plugin in turn until you find the one causing the problem. Jetpack is often the culprit.

Thank you Aerin

I quickly disabled all the Jetpback plugins, but that didn’t fix the problem.

I’ll more selectively disable other plugins that are used by the site to see which one causes the problem. I use a variety of plugins, so disabling things may cause the site to lose some functionality, so will try to do this late at night, when I hope none are accessing the site.

Will report back which plugin was the culprit.

-Pete

Aerin

I’ve tracked down the offending plugin. As one would expect I started at the top and it was the last one on the bottom.

Unfortunately on our system the offending plugin was:

Yoast SEO

Which does SEO ranking analysis and I would imagine is fairly widely used by sites that are trying to optimize the appeal of their site.

Could you try to duplicate this in one of your test environments, or could there be other factors that could be creating this problem uniquely on our system?

-Pete

I’ve been in contact with Yoast and they have looked at the problem but just tell me the QEM shouldn’t use $_POST. Which is daft as the method I use in the plugin is wildly published as an acceptable way of handling forms.

I will see if I can find a fix for this but I’m not hopeful as the form processing is very complex.

Aerin

Thanks for the feedback. I selectively activate Yoast so we can do SEO checking but then deactivate it to make sure QEM runs.

Although we’ve fixed the “You are already registered for this event” problem, we are still not getting a notification email when someone signs up. So we have to check Registrations for new sign ups.

Any idea of what I should check to see where mail is broken.

-Pete

Have you entered your email address to receive notifications?

I’m still looking at the Yoast problem – there may be a solution but it means quite a lot of recoding so will take a few days.

Aerin

Yes the email address to where to send notifications, is set in the “Notifications” section in General Settings.

Unfortunately we’re running into the “You are already registered for this event” problem again, even with Yoast disabled. Seems some other Plugin is now using the same method that Yoast was, to cause this problem.

You mentioned re-coding to get around this problem, is that something that you are actively working on, and would it be available soon?

-Pete

Hi Pete,

I thought I had a solution for a while but that failed as well. I do have a way ahead but it means a huge amount of recoding and it’s taking some time.

The problem is plugins that read the page contents in the background (for analysis or some other function). Because they do this the form gets submitted twice within a fraction of a second. The first submission registers your details and updates the database. When the form is submitted for a second time the database is checked and your name appears in the list which is why you get the rejection message.

Aerin

I’m aghast at how multiple different plugins can step on each other in the WordPress environment. It’s one thing to read data of another application, it’s quite another if that type of access results in database updates for another application!

As a long time software developer who has little interest in in digging into WordPress as I have a strong aversion to PHP, this gives me little confidence in the infrastructure of WordPress.

-Pete

Yoast overrides everything I do. No matter how I run the form validation and processing Yoast reloads the page and junks all the confirmation messages.

And because Yoast is a big WordPress contributor they aren’t going to do anything about it. It’s very frustrating as their methodology prevents the use of $_POST for anything.

I am also seeing this issue, probably after I installed Yoast, I appreciate that it is difficult to resolve for now I have changed the default message from ‘You are already registered for this event’ to ‘Thank you for Booking this Event’. I presume that if you simply disabled the check then we would end up with duplicates for an event.