Support

July 6, 2023 at 4:25 am

Hi there,

She mentioned a couple of events to me, but they are showing correctly at the moment.

If they are showing correctly, then EE must be releasing the registration, right?

Unless the admin has already adjusted to fix those?

If you installed the WP Crontrol plugin:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-crontrol/

Then go to Dashboard -> Tools -> Cron Events

Can you see any notices about WP_CRON being disabled?

July 18, 2023 at 7:10 am

Hi Anita,

You have crons in there from days ago, that’s not correct.

Can you send me temp login credentials so I can take a look at the cron events?

https://eventespresso.com/send-login-details/

July 19, 2023 at 8:05 am

Ok, so WP_CRON has been disabled on your site, so your client is right the registrations will not be released, because there is nothing to trigger them to be released.

At the top of the Cron events table is this:

The DISABLE_WP_CRON constant is set to true. WP-Cron spawning is disabled.

That’s “normal” and is ok as long as the host (or whoever disabled WP_CRON) also set up a real cron on the server to trigger the cron jobs.

A quick explanation so you can follow this…

WP_CRON is a pseudo cron, you can’t set up real crons through WordPress itself it has to be done on the server. So what WordPress does with WP_CRON is check in the background for any scheduled tasks in on every single request:

Site visit 1 – check for wp_cron jobs… nope none to run.
Site visit 2 – check for wp_cron jobs… nope none to run.
Site visit 3 – check for wp_cron jobs… ohhhh, yeah this one! Run it.
Site visit 4 – check for wp_cron jobs… nope none to run.

As you can see that’s happening on every single page visit so it’s inefficient but the best available without a ‘real’ cron. Hosts don’t like WP_CRON as it basically doubles the amount of work every request does (one for the actual page your visiting and one for the wp_cron check).

A real cron sits on the server and runs at a specific interval (which you set when you set up the cron), as it’s within the server OS itself it runs without any intervention at the exact time it should.

So right now, it looks like your site has WP_CRON disabled but no ‘real’ cron has been set up to replace it. So I’d recommend just creating that cron and you’ll find details on that here:

https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-disable-wp-cron-in-wordpress-and-set-up-proper-cron-jobs/

Who is your host? They may have a doc themselves for this.

July 21, 2023 at 4:50 am

so I set mine up to run every 15 minutes at 5, 20, 24 and 50 minutes of the hour.

I’d recommend using every 5 mins as the message system uses WP_CRON, so using 15 mins means it can take up to 30mins for messages to work through your message queue, 5mins means up to 10 (there are 2 stages for messages, generating and sending).

Now when I look at the Cron Events in WP Crontrol, there are none in the past.

Great!

So because WP_CRON had been disabled your client was correct, the reservations would not have been getting released, but from this point on they should be.