One out of seven feeds not showing on calendar

Is the source for the Athletics calendar on the same server as the website, or possibly on another server in an internal network?

You may be able to resolve the issue by adding the domain name of the Athletics calendar to the Allow access to these hostnames that resolve to reserved IP addresses box on the ICS Calendar Settings page. (But be aware that if the calendar is on a server on an internal network that is not accessible to the outside Internet, and your live website is not also on that network, there will not be a way to access that calendar.)

Thanks for the quick reply! All seven calendars are Google calendar ICS feed URLs and are not on the same server as the website. Also all have public access. It works on our dev site, which is on our internal server: https://webdev.jacksonacademy.org/events/.

Also, the Athletic .ics is the only one that doesn’t work in the ICS Feed URL Tester, but it does work in the ICS preview.

Thanks for this additional info. Can you please send me the feed URL along with your System Report using the Pro Support Request form? (It’s fine if you don’t have Pro.) Thanks.

Hi, I apologize for the delay. I just submitted the requested info through the Pro Support form. We do have Pro if that makes any difference with the troubleshooting. Thanks!

@iamjblackwell Are you sure you submitted the form? I never received an email notification, and I just went in and checked the form entries directly in my site database and it’s not there.

Yes, I’ve actually submitted it twice. Once before posting in here and again this morning.

@iamjblackwell Strange… it’s just not coming through, but I have received other support requests so I know the form is working.

Can you just email me your shortcode and system report to support at room34 dot com? Thanks.

@iamjblackwell Ah, never mind… they both did come in, but Akismet flagged them as spam. Very strange.

Haha, okay well disregard the email I just sent. Thanks!

Sharing the bulk of my email response here, since it may be relevant to others who are encountering a similar issue:

I tested your Athletics feed with the preview tool and the ICS Feed URL Tester on my site, and it’s working fine in both cases, and I also was able to download the ICS file by loading the URL directly in my browser.

But… I did notice that it took quite a long time in all three cases, and I think that gets to the heart of the issue. This feed file is pretty large, and I see it has a huge number of events going back as far as 2009.

Unfortunately, old events never get cleared out of the feed (some sources do that, but Google doesn’t), and there’s no way to just request a portion of the feed from the source, so each time the feed is requested, it’s downloading all of that data, most of which is not needed.

I’m not sure if it’s feasible for you to do this, but if you could go in and delete all of the years-old events from the Athletics calendar, it would probably improve the performance. That would really be the “best” solution, but it could be very time-consuming and tedious.

There’s another option, but I’m not positive it will work. The feed may not be loading for you because of a memory issue, but I think it’s more likely a timeout issue. This solution would only help if it’s a memory issue…

Go to ICS Calendar > Settings and Utilities > Settings and bump up the value for Increase memory limit when rendering calendars. Set it to 512 MB to start, and then adjust further if needed. Be sure to run Clear Cached Calendar Data under the Utilities tab after saving the changed setting, then see if the calendar loads.

If the issue is due to a timeout, there’s not currently a way around that, but I could add it as another setting in the next update.

Thank you for your continued support on this issue. Unfortunately, making changes to the memory didn’t make a difference. I am currently speaking with our tech and athletic departments to remove past events to see if that resolves our issue and I will post the results here in case someone else comes looking for a similar solution. Thanks again!

Thanks for the follow-up info. I do think it may make sense for me to explore adding an option to configure the request timeout limit within the ICS Calendar settings though. Right now it has a 5-second timeout, which is important for performance (and is usually more than adequate, since this is a request directly between two servers which will typically have high-speed connections, and the transferred data is usually quite small). But I think this is a good example where, if we bumped up the timeout even to 10 seconds, the request would probably go through. You’d get the data, but the page would still probably be a bit slow because all of that old data is getting parsed.

Actually… I was just taking another look at the code, and I forgot that I had changed the timeout on the new request method to 30 seconds. I see in your System Report that you have the legacy request method turned on. Is there a specific reason you need to use the legacy method? If not, try turning it off and see if the Athletics calendar loads. (The legacy method still has the 5 second timeout.)

No luck with turning off the legacy method. Legacy was turned on from when it was on our dev site because the page wasn’t loading at all. We’ve since updated the plugin to the latest Pro version and looks like we actually don’t need it on any more.

I’m curious if the ICS Feed URL Tester works with this URL now that you’ve turned off the legacy loading method. If it does, then I’d suggest trying the feed in a separate ICS Calendar all by itself and see if that works. (This is not a permanent solution, just an effort at narrowing down the problem, since I wasn’t able to replicate it on my end.)