After adding or updating events on our backend calendar, I click the refresh link, but I get this notice: “The linked calendar was unchanged.”
This can go on for some time. It works eventually, but I’ve been waiting more than 20 minutes at this point since the last time I updated our calendar, and LiveWhale is still saying the link is unchanged. This is an unusually long delay, but it’s not uncommon to have to wait several minutes before it recognizes the change. Is there a way to get it to recognize changes more quickly?
It’s an iCal feed hosted on Cloudflare. We’re using a new service, which created the iCal feed, but the same thing used to happen when we hosted our own homegrown iCal feed on a local server.
Thanks for writing, and sorry to hear this is giving you trouble.
When you click to “refresh” a Linked Calendar, LiveWhale always does a live fetch of your feed URL and compares it to last time. The “unchanged” message means the content it received was identical to before.
Since you’re behind Cloudflare, that’s the first place I’d look – it could be that some caching on that end is affecting the .ics file even after you’ve published new changes, in which case LiveWhale would get a stale copy just like a browser would. If it’s sending a Cache-Control header, for instance, or other caching rules affecting .ics files would be a good place to check.
(The fact that you were seeing the same thing on a self-hosted feed outside of CloudFlare doesn’t necessarily rule this out, but it might point to the same question of a web server or proxy caching the static file.)
One way to investigate this would be to, right after you save a calendar edit, request the feed URL directly (via browser, or curl) and see if your new content is present in that raw output yet. Once the data is there, LiveWhale should capture it on the next refresh, there’s nothing we can see on our side holding it back. Hope this helps! If this doesn’t fully resolve the question, we can also do some more hands-on diagnosis of your specific feed file via Personalized Email Support or the Request Help Form.