Linked Calendars Lag for New Events

LiveWhale
1

When a new event is added to our backend .ics calendar, it is now taking until the next day for the event to show up on LiveWhale, even when using the refresh feature. This only applies to newly created events. Changes to existing events update as expected using the refresh feature. This has been happening since at least mid-/late March. Is there a fix for this?

Thank you.

2

Thanks for posting, Jonathan. Events from linked calendars should get synced (created or updated) hourly, so we can take a stab at reproducing this to check for any bugs.

How is the specific .ics feed being generated? Is it something you’re pulling in from a 3rd-party service—if so, which?—or something you’re creating manually and uploading somewhere via SFTP? Thanks!

3

I’ll have to check with our IT department. I don’t manage the code. I’ll reply asap. Thank you.

4

I received the following from the IT person who set up our feed in 2019 or 2020. I don’t think we’ve made any changes on our end since he built it. Note that “MasterCalendar” refers to our backend calendar. It’s an inhouse product, rather old at this point, but they don’t make changes to it often. Here’s his reply in any case:

"We get the .ics feed from a feed I wrote that pulls data from MasterCalendar. I tested the link in MasterCalendar that pulls the data and it seems to be working fine and pulling data through July. Here is link that you can post in a browser and get an .ics file to view via notepad. https://gretel.music.indiana.edu/MISC/MasterCalendar_Feed/MasterCalendarFeed.ics

I also looked in LiveWhale, I did test the feed and it indicated all was working and contained 1399 events."

For what it’s worth, I added two new events yesterday morning, and once again, they didn’t show up on LiveWhale until this morning (or sometime after I logged out around 5pm yesterday).

5

Jonathen,

The feed has 1399 events. But in LW it says 3893 events. That is strange.

Is there something running (a CRON job) on the server where the feed is being built every 24 hours? It almost seems like that. Can you check with your IT if they have a CRON job running on the server to update the feed every 24 hours?

Thanks,

Akbar

6

Hi Akbar,

I think we tried to archive some of the events at some point, which may account for the discrepancy in the number of events in the feed. Or else Andy may have reset the date range so that the earlier events aren’t updated, but maybe they still register.

As for the 24-hour update possibility, I’m not sure why that would prevent new events from being added while still allowing existing events to update via the refresh feature. That used to work for adding new events, too, but I’ll ask Andy.

Jonathan

7

Hi Akbar,

Here’s Andy’s reply:

"The way I understand is that not all events in LiveWhale came in via the MasterCalendar feed. So number of events will be different.

And no there are not any cron jobs running and not sure what is meant by the 24 hours.

If you look at the data from LiveWhale feed, it contains all new events including events up to July 2025."

I’d not considered that some events are posted directly to LiveWhale, while others come from the feed. I don’t think that accounts for the considerable discrepancy in numbers, but it does explain some of it.