Double bookings

Hi www,

We had a similar report from another user, but we’re not able to recreate it on our end, and the user was also not able to recreate it (one of their customers had reported it), so we were not ultimately able to get to the bottom of it. Hopefully, given that you directly experienced it yourself, you and I can work together to figure out your issue, whether it’s the same or different.

The first thing I’ll ask is for the URL of your booking page, if possible. I’d like to see if there are any clues (e.g. from the developer console or the page source code, etc.) that might indicate an issue or conflict.

Also, do you happen to recall what device and browser you were using when this happened (i.e. Safari on iPhone, or Firefox on a Windows PC, etc.)? My first guess would be that this is either caused by the submit button not being disabled/grayed out when first clicked, allowing for a second click, or by a scripting, etc. conflict that causes the form to be submitted twice even though the button is only clicked once. Knowing the exact device and browser might help shed some light on whether or not either of these could be the case.

Also, sometimes a conflict with another plugin can cause such problems. As a test, could you disable all your plugins, but ours, and see if that makes a difference? Do you still get double bookings? From there, you would need to activate your plugins one by one until the issue happens again, to know which is conflicting.

Been using this plugin since the original programmer ” Theme of the Crop” developed it and passed it on to 5 star. This is the same answer I receive when I report a problem. “They can’t reproduced the problem”. Sounds like a “Canned answer” If you don’t know CSS/PHP/JS I would stay clear from 5 star plugins. I will say if your Theme is not supported any longer, you will sooner or later start seeing problems. Last 5 star plugin update results turned my screen white. I had to contact my host and disable 5 star so I could do repairs. They do have good products except we are their test site.

Hello @jaysupport

I’m sure we can figure this out, however, I’m not that comfortable putting everything here. Is there a way we can get in touch to solve this one on one ?

As for the browser, it was Chrome 83.0.4103.116 on Windows 10 Enterprise.

I will not be able to deactivate all plugins since this is a production site.

Also, it doesn’t happen every time, I’ve seen it three to four times now, which would amount to about 5%.

Thanks

Hi @wwwtsaarbe,

That’s no problem. You can send a message to [email protected] if you’re more comfortable discussing it via email.

Just a follow-up after having discussed this with several different users of the plugin. What we’ve been able to find so far is that, in seemingly all cases, the duplicate bookings are being caused by the customer (the person making the booking) either refreshing their page after submitting the booking request or doing something like, after having made the booking on a phone, going to a different app and then coming back to the browser app, which then automatically refreshes the page and re-submits the form. Every browser will display a warning message when this happens, stating that you’re about to re-submit the form and asking if you’re sure you want to continue, but we’ve found that many people just ignore this/don’t read it and just re-submit the form, causing double bookings for you.

With that in mind, for anyone else experiencing duplicate bookings, would you be able to please let me know (a screenshot of your bookings page in the admin panel would also help a lot) how close together the duplicate bookings are? For example, do they both have the exact same timestamp, or very close? Or are they several minutes or hours apart, indicating a refresh that happened at a later time?

We have also found that everyone who mentioned having double bookings was using the success messages and not the page redirect options for when a booking is made.

With that in mind, I would suggest that, if you’re seeing repeated duplicate bookings, you try using the “Pending Redirect Page” and “Confirmed Redirect Page” options (in the Basic area of the Settings page) to have it redirect to another page after the form is submitted. That way, it will not be possible for someone to refresh the page and re-submit the booking form, as they will now be on a different page.

Hi again @jaysupport

First of all, thanks for the time you’re putting into this.

I’ve implemented the redirection page – the reCaptcha we discussed wasn’t displaying nicely, so I removed it and didn’t pursue that path any further.

I will keep a close eye on all reservations and will report back if anything still goes wrong – or in a few weeks if all stays well.

Thanks again!

That’s great, thank you!

Hi @jaysupport

It’s been a week and so far so good, the redirect page seems to fix the issue.
I’ll do one more update in a few days or weeks.

Thanks again

I also get this complaint from some of my customers (restaurants).

Isn’t there a way to clear the post data so it won’t be send again when the page is being refreshed? That way the extra redirect pages aren’t needed.

Thanks
JP

Hi JP,

I don’t believe there’s a way to prevent post data being resent, as that happens on the client’s end. We’re considering the idea in a future update of preventing two bookings being made with the same information (party size, date/time, name, email and phone #) as a potential way of blocking multiple bookings caused by page refreshes.

I saw you have implemented the double booking prevention. Awesome. Thank you very much!

Aha! Thanks for this.

Using the redirect page still works fine for me so I’ll stick to that solution, but good job implementing a fix.