Support

October 17, 2019 at 7:05 am

Hi,

May I ask when are the reminders for the Saturday and Sunday events supposed to send?

October 17, 2019 at 11:07 am

One thing to be aware of with any type of scheduled task on a WordPress site is WordPress does not use a true cron. Instead it uses a function that’s called wp_cron and it’s triggered by visits to your site. The Automated event reminders plugin uses wp_cron (just like scheduling a post publish date and time).

You can actually monitor wp_cron events by installing the WP Crontrol plugin:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-crontrol/

Then check your site’s Tools > Cron events page.

There you’ll find a task labeled
AHEE__EventEspresso_AutomatedEventNotifications_core_tasks_Scheduler__check
and it will show what time the Next Run is scheduled.

Is that next run scheduled within the next 3 hours?

October 17, 2019 at 12:02 pm

The output looks different than what I’ve seen, but the next run time looks correct because it’s less than 3 hours.

One thing that could help for your site would be to move to a real cron. This will need to be set up by a developer, and they’ll need to follow the web host’s documentation.

Here are a few links to some examples of the documentation from a few hosts:

https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/real-cron-job/
https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/disable-wp-cron/
https://wpengine.com/support/wp-cron-wordpress-scheduling/

October 25, 2019 at 5:25 am

Hi mpurse,

Are these events set up as individual events or events with multiple datetimes?

Are you using the upcoming Event Notifications or the upcoming Datetimes notifications? (I’m assuming Event but I’m trying to narrow down the problem so need to ask).

Roughly how many registrants do you have on the events? (Because I want to know how many messages are being triggered at once)

What is the ‘status’ of the events? Published, Sold out, another?

Have you checked your sites error logs for any errors being thrown by the upcoming event add-on? It’s possible something is timing out during the request (meaning the function was triggered but its processing failed) which may explain why you get such inconsistent results and if that’s the case there should be an error in the logs.

November 4, 2019 at 8:11 am

Hi mpurse,

We spent some time investigating this and think we have found the problem. It looks on some servers the query used to pull in the registrations linked to the events that should trigger this is not returning registration linked to events that have no template ID saved on them.

Meaning if you created the event before the Automated Upcoming Event Notification Add-on (AUEN for short) was created and have not updated it since activating it, it doesn’t pull in the registrations for that event.

But if you create the event with that add-on actived or have updated the event with it activated it will have updated the template ID in the database and will be included in the results.

So, I assume you are still having issues with notifications not triggering?

If you edit your next set of events and just click update (you don’t need to set a template for AUEN etc, just edit each of the events and update with that add-on enabled) do all of the notifications correctly trigger for those next upcoming events?

The query used basically checks for a custom template ID or no template ID at all and it looks like sometimes the check for no template at all is failing. We have a ticket to investigate/fix this however the query used looks correct so may take a little time to find a working solution, the above workaround should allow your notifications to work consistently in the meantime if indeed that is the issue on your site.