Says 'filled' but they are not

Can you send me a link to the page so I can see how it is being displayed?

Nobody else is reporting any similar issues, and everything is working fine on my own sites, so something is not working right on your particular site.

My first guess would be some kind of database issue, where it’s not reading the number of signups correctly for when it is trying to calculate how many spots are still open. But, seems strange that it shows correctly in the widget but not on your main sheets list page.

Are you including any date arguments or any other arguments in the shortcode for the main display?

thanks for the quick reply.

I’m using the basic shortcode – ptmusicboosters.com/volnteers/volunteers/volunteer-sign-ups/ is the main page. The widget can be seen on a few pages, one is Fundraisers.

Thanks-

Sorry, typo -ptmusicboosters.com/volunteers/volunteer-sign-ups

I can’t really tell what’s going on. I set up a similar multi-day sheet on my development server with the same tasks and # of slots for August 2 and August 3, with same start and end times, and it’s working fine for me.

I thought perhaps there could be an issue with the overnight task since the end time is technically before the start time, but I don’t think I use the end time in any functions to calculate whether something should show or not (just start date and time), so it’s really just display only, and it worked just fine for me.

Did you perhaps have another sign-up sheet plugin that you tried first? Mine is a port/rework of the plugin by DLS software, and the database tables are similar, but we have diverged quite a bit since I ported my version about 3 years ago.

Or, did you have a bunch of previous dates that have already expired for this particular sheet? That shouldn’t break things, but I’m trying to figure out any possible combination of things I can test to see if I can replicate the issue.

Do you have it set to automatically deleted expired signups?

Was this sheet copied from an old one?

At this point, I really have no idea since it’s working just fine for me. If this was a major bug in the plugin, many other people would have reported it already, but you are the first.

Also, it appears to only be affecting that one event. There are other multi-day events on your site that seem to be displaying correctly. For example, your Away Football Games event is multi-day, and the number of open slots is showing correctly.

Perhaps the best thing you can try right now would be to first export all the sign-ups for the sheet that is giving you trouble, and then totally delete that sheet and create a new one. Then you could use the info you exported to manually sign-up the same people again (you will need to LOG OUT of your admin account first so that the sign-ups will get assigned to the user account that matches the email you enter for each person). If that fixes it, then most likely you had some type of database corruption on your server.

Otherwise, unless you are willing to give me access to your sever account so I can view database files and try to figure out what’s going on, I really couldn’t help you… and that would be beyond my level of support for this free plugin anyway, especially it seems like a strange problem with just one sheet in particular.

It seems to have corrected itself this morning. Maybe there was an a test sheet originally, but I don’t remember if it was named the same.

If it does this again, I’ll try deleting the sheet and then adding it again.

Thanks for the fast response and great help!

Perhaps you have some sort of caching system that was caching database values, which then served an old result to my plugin, messing up the calculations?? Just another wild guess at this point.

Since it is working for you now, I’ll mark this as resolved. Please let me know if it happens again.

The same thing happened last night, where the entire sheet shows ‘filled’ event though many of the tasks are not. By morning, it’s showing correctly again. There’s no server cache (I called to see) or cache plugin.

Maybe it’s those overnight times (10pm to 6am) that are confusing things. They only have a couple nights left of this multi-day event, so I’m not sure it’s worth it to re-add the form and have to add everyone back in.

My concern is more the next multi-day event, and although they show correctly now, so did Away Camp one, until each day occurred. Not really sure what to make of it at this point.

I will scan through my code again to see if it’s doing any calculations based on the end time. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on the code, so I’m not 100% certain. The overnight thing would probably be the best guess at this time, especially since the display issue seems to only be happening at certain times. You are probably the first person to set up tasks with overnight times, and thus maybe the first person to discover some flaw in the code calculations. Since there is no different date specified for the end time, that could be confusing things.

Another option is to simply leave the end time blank. It’s not required, and you could specify what time that task ends in the sheet details or even in the task name if the volunteers need to know an exact end time.

I removed the end times for the overnight tasks, so no am times are listed.

At 8pm today’s tasks disappeared, even though today is not over, and the tasks don’t end until 10:30pm. It says “filled” and “-4 Open Spots” – there are 4 empty spots left for today, but I don’t know if it’s related to that.

The widget shows “-4” also. Technically, there are 2 spots left that are upcoming, and 4 empty ones for today’s date.

The time zone is set in WP settings as New York (we are in PA). Should I have this set differently? Is that an issue?

I checked through my code and the start and end times are ONLY used for display. They are never used in any calculations.

The date is used, though. I found one spot in my code where I was using the PHP time function as opposed to the wordpress current_time function to figure out the “now” time to compare against the start date and figure out if an event should be shown or not.

So, it’s possible that if your server’s time is different than your WordPress time setting, things could get thrown off in that period of time where one thinks it’s the next day already, while the other doesn’t.

I will push out an update later tonight to change that one spot that still uses the server time. I was going to release a small update anyway as someone else did a German translation for the plugin which needs to be included as well.

If the new version doesn’t fix it, then I’m not sure what is going on. But, if your server where you site is hosted is on a different time zone than you have your WordPress site set to, that could be one possible cause. New York and PA are both in the same time zone, so that wouldn’t matter. But, if your the actual server where you site is hosted is in a different time zone, such as California, then there would be 4 hours where there is a discrepancy between the server time and your WordPress time setting.

New version 1.8.10 has been released. Please let me know if that fixes the issue.

It’s 8:00pm and I guess it’s partially solved. Today’s tasks just removed themselves from the sheet (so this problem remains). I know that you said the times are for display only so the times are irrelevant.

What’s weird is that it no longer says “filled” with a negative number (so that’s an improvement!), but it lists “3” left – which technically there is 3 left (today, which is no longer showing, has 3 open spots). This is a little confusing because it makes it look like there are 3 left for tomorrow, which there are not. I would think if it removed today’s sheet, it should no longer show that 3 spots are open, because no one can get to them to signup.

Thoughts?

OK… looks like there might be a couple more spots where I need to rework the database queries and pass in the WordPress time as a variable to the SQL query to filter out sheets that have expired. The spot I tweaked on the last update was a simple PHP comparison, but SQL queries are direct queries on the database table and the SQL “NOW” time is using the server’s database time. SQL does not have access to any WordPress functions when doing database queries.

I have it set to add 24 hours to the “NOW” time so that the sheets or tasks will still appear for the full day that their date is set for.

The problem must be that you are on the East coast, and your server is on the West coast, so there is a 4 hour time zone difference, which is why your sheet disappears at 8PM instead of midnight. Hasn’t really been an issue for anyone else, and would you really have people signing up for something on that day after 8PM on the same day?? By then, I think it would be kind of late to be signing up.

I will take another look and see what I can do, although I don’t consider this any kind of showstopping “bug”… just a minor annoyance, and I guess most other people are using servers in their same time zone, or close enough that they don’t notice.

West coast time is 3 hours behind me, so it’s not yet midnight, but wherever the server is, it seems to be the issue. Go Daddy!

I agree, no one is signing up at 8pm for something today. Most of the parents who sign up, though, tend to go on the website in the evenings, so if they were on there now, they wouldn’t understand why it says there are 3 spots left when there are not any spots tomorrow. That’s what’s confusing and inaccurate – I don’t mind the sheet vanishing all that much.

Not trying to be a pain, but I know that’s the feedback I’ll be getting. At least it’s not showing negative numbers.

No problems… I’ll see what I can do when I have some time.