EME automatically creating sample events & locations

EME only creates the default events/locations if it can’t detect a previous installed version (by looking at a wordpress option value). So if that’s the case for you, it means the wordpress option has been deleted. That can happen if someone/something else deleted this option, or when you activated the option “Delete all EME settings when upgrading or deactivating?”.

Ok, I haven’t changed or upgraded anything in the past 3 months or so. Where can I find the WordPress option? Is this in EME settings or in the database? And how can I fix this problem?

The EME db version is called “eme_version” in the wordpress options table. You can also see its current version in the EME settings, tab “Other”, setting “EME DB version”.
Also, EME uses the sql call “SHOW TABLES LIKE” to verify if a table exists (it does that for all EME tables, like WP, but if it doesn’t find anything for events or locations it will insert the demo events/locations). So check if your SQL user is allowed to execute that call too.

The EME DB version is showing as 257. So does this mean that EME can detect the installed version, and if so then why is it creating the sample events and locations?

This was happening when I had a live event, before the Coronavirus lockdown. And even with a live event, EME was still creating additional sample events.

Is there some way to prevent the sample events being created? It’s creating 4 copies of each sample event and location every day, so again today I had to delete 8 copies of everything, and these sample events are being shown via an RSS feed onto another web site which is confusing people. Thanks

EDIT: about the SQL call, I’m not sure how to do that but I’ll ask for help to test it.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by timb111.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by timb111.

The latest DB version value is 268. So EME is not being updated.
In your case the version of EME doesn’t match what is expected and the database call “SHOW TABLES LIKE” is most likely not working as expected either. So I’m guessing something is seriously wrong with your setup …

For now I’m going to mark this resolved, feel free to reply when your db issues are solved but you still think EME has an issue.

Hi Franky,

I found this happening on my other websites as well. On one website it happened just one time, on another website it happened a few times over a couple of days, and on another website it’s been happening around 2-3 times per day for several weeks now.

Regarding upgrading the EME plugin, I don’t normally like to upgrade my WordPress plugins continuously as I’ve had some website functionality break as a result of this, and I just want to create a working website one time and leave it like that. I hadn’t changed anything on these websites for several months, so nothing should have change to make this happen.

I have a Windows reseller hosting plan, and the websites are completely separate setups so one should not affect the others.

But one thing that was happening over the past year was that the hosting company was taking backups every night and it was making the websites non-responsive for around a half hour. I asked them if they could do this in a way that didn’t affect my websites but they were unable to change this. I wonder if this is connected to EME adding the sample events? Perhaps it was unable to read the tables and so created the events? If this is the case then I think that EME shouldn’t respond like that because my website visitors will see a number of strange duplicate events. I wonder if it would be better for EME to create sample events as drafts rather than live events, or for EME to ask the admin in the admin panel if they want to create sample events? That way it won’t affect live sites.

I’m now switching to a Linux hosting plan, just to see if things work any better, and I’m installing fresh instances of WordPress and EME, so let’s see if this issue comes up again.

Like I said: EME only creates the default events and locations if it can’t detect that the event or location DB table exists. If that happens, it tries to create the table and then insert these. But if that happens on a installation in production, something is seriously wrong with the DB … I’m curious about your move to linux though.