Birthday calendar bizarre repetitions and other issues

Question

Level 1

20 points

Birthday calendar bizarre repetitions and other issues

I have the STRANGEST things happening with birthdays on both my iPhone (5, 32GB, white, iOS 6) and iPad (32GB, iOS 6, white).

I'm posting it here in the iPhone forum, assuming more people may be able to help.

First of all, I sync a Google Apps calendar with my iPhone and iPad via CalDAV. I also sync my Google Contacts with my address book (including birthdays), which syncs via my MacBook on OS 10.6.8 using the sync icon in the system tray. (I hesitate to call it MobileMe, even though that's what the System Preferences calls it, because it really has nothing to do with MobileMe -- it does not sync via MobileMe [I do not have an account], it just syncs my Address Book with Google with my phone or iPad when hooked up. It is through a WIRED connection that it does the final sync to the device.)

So, my birthdays from my address/contact books and my Google contacts DO sync and they DO show up on both my iOS devices in the fancy Birthday calendar with the cute cake symbol, as well as in my Google calendar.

NOW HERE'S THE CRAZY PARTS.

Sometime recently, my birthdays were getting repeated. But oddly, enough they are a different amount on the two iOS devices. I have 18 copies of all birthdays (on the same day) in my iPhone calendar and 68 (YES, SIXTY-EIGHT COPIES) in my iPad of every birthday.
My Google calendar shows NO SUCH ERRONEOUS copies.
The crazier thing is that the copies of the birthdays are NOT on the birthday calendar. In fact, IT'S AS IF THEY JUMP AROUND ON DIFFERENT CALENDARS. They show up all one color, but some random color. They will appear or disappear only SOMETIMES if I turn "off" some calendars or others (for example, once they would go away if I hid a "Personal" calendar, another if I hid a calendar I subscribe to via Google but sync via CalDAV from Weather Underground, and another calendar that is a Google calendar but also my "default calendar" in the iOS settings). And this is all within minutes.
When I go into an instance of the repeated calendar event, it will actually say it belongs to my default calendar, regardless of what was hiding or showing it before.
When I try to "edit" the birthday just to see what happens, it crashes the app.

WHAT. THE. ______???

Here's what already I've tried:

Searching the internet for someone with a similar problem. NADA.
Turning off the option to sync my Google birthday calendar via the Google sync page (I think it's actually unnecessary anyway, since iOS pulls from the contact book, anyway). That did nothing.
Hiding all calendars and then selecting them to show one at a time to figure out which calendar was causing the problem, but as I mentioned above, it is not consistent.
Re-syncing my devices with iTunes.
Searching for and merging duplicate contacts in Google contacts.
Turning off the iOS birthday calendar.
Killing and re-starting the calendar app.
Re-starting my iOS devices.
Re-syncing my contact book with my devices.

Someone. Please. Tell me you're having this problem and that you have the solution? I'm going crazy over here! I can't remember anything that may have triggered this to happen.

Posted on Oct 22, 2012 7:04 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 16, 2017 11:26 AM in response to Italian Rose

I have multiple calendars and birthday calendars and I don't have or sync Facebook or sync with Google on my iPhone. By multiple I mean a dozen or so calendars and may be 80 birthday calendars.

Happened after iOS 10 update. I just caught it last week when I started seeing multiple birthdays on my Calendar for the same person.

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Answer 2

Tgara

Level 4

3,597 points

Oct 22, 2012 7:06 PM in response to jsml

I didn't read your whole post (too long), but your problem is that you are syncing too many calendars with the same birthdays. Sync only one calendar with birthdays and you should be fine.

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Answer 3

sfri

Level 1

0 points

Oct 23, 2012 11:21 AM in response to jsml

I have the same problem.

Deleted all my Accounts. After that there are two Calenders left, The Calender and the contacts birthdays (but I hav no contacts, deleted them all). As soon as I show both the birthday duplicates appear again.

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Answer 4

gboysun

Level 1

4 points

Oct 23, 2012 1:52 PM in response to sfri

I have this problem too. It doesn't matter which calendar I add, rather it's when it gets up to a certain number of calendars displayed, it then shows the bazillion occurrence event. Regardless of calendar. Same exact behavior as jmsl is describing.

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Answer 5

pollprod

Level 1

0 points

Oct 23, 2012 2:33 PM in response to jsml

I have the exact same problem, 68 birthday calendar events of my own birthday... No solution yet. Help.

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Answer 6

iGust

Level 1

0 points

Oct 23, 2012 8:18 PM in response to jsml

Hi, all.

Should this solve ur problem with duplicating bday cal. But this is not a system-fixed, this is just a small trick.

I notice the duplicate bday cal shows up when we put the cal on "Show All Calendars". So what we need to do is sync one calendar (empty recommended) from any email that u're not intended to use in cal apps.

For ex: I have three active calendars (Gmail, Fb, iPhone as in birthday). Then i add n sync one more cal, say from my Hotmail which is empty cal. What i have to do next is just hide that Hotmail cal. Voila! It works. There's no more duplicate on bday cal, which is so annoying.

Hope this helps,

iGust 🙂

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Answer 7

Oct 23, 2012 8:59 PM in response to jsml

I think this is another program problem on the new update.iOS6 My phone iOS 4 this morning repeated birthdays and the dates where wrong and i only have 1 calander that i had before this update and had no problems with my calander before.

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Answer 8

jsml Author

Level 1

20 points

Oct 23, 2012 11:22 PM in response to jsml

I figured it out! (Or at least, it's been fixed for a day on both my iPad and iPhone.)

By the way, I discovered more oddities, but I'm not going to even bother with describing them.)

I am assuming everyone here has been syncing their birthday calendar off of Google/Gmail (whether CalDAV or Exchange, it doesn't matter).

The key to this is to know three things:

A) Tgara was on to something: syncing the Google birthday calendar in your Google sync settings -- even though it does not show up in your calendar list on the iphone/ipad -- is the culprit.

B) BUT, simply un-syncing will not make them go away unless you completely un-sync all your Google calendars. Once the repetitions get into your phone/iPad via they are kind of "stuck" there, and you've got to go back to the beginning to un-stick them for good.

C) Thus, it may require some trial and error because I had to repeat this a couple times. I may no have the right order of operations, but this is my best recreation/guess.

How I fixed it (I had to repeat a couple times for some reason):

1) I'm debating whether you have to do this step (I think I did it on my iPhone, but not my iPad, and yet both worked), but it doesn't take long, so you could just to be safe: on your iOS device, Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars -- delete your Google calendar account.

2) On your iOS device, go to the proper Google sync page to choose what calendars are available for syncing.

For Exchange, go to: https://m.google.com/sync/settings/iconfig/device

For CalDAV and Gmail/normal sync, go to: https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/iphoneselect

For Google Apps CalDAV (although it worked for me on the normal page above), go to: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/yourhosteddomain.com/iphoneselect

If you're not sure which method you use, do both of them.

3) Sign in and choose the device in question (if prompted) and then uncheck ALL the calendars. Save/apply.

4) Go to calendar app. You should have an On my iPhone or On my iPad calendar and the iOS birthday calendar. Ensure that no repetitions are seen when you check mark each calendar idividually and also collectively to be visible. If there are, repeat the steps above.

5) Once the repetitions are gone, go to your iOS settings and add the calendar account back in if you removed it in step one.

6) Go back to the calendar app. Again, you will have two calendars -- one default Google calendar and one ios birthday calendar. Turn on each one at a time and also together to make sure the repetitions are gone. If they are not, repeat the above again.

7) Once they are gone, go back to the Google sync page(s) and add all the calendars you want back, BUT DO NOT SELECT YOUR BIRTHDAY CALENDAR. Save/apply.

8) Go to the calendar app. Open up the calendar list. Wait for it to refresh. Now you should be able to turn on all your calendars you wish to see, wait for it to propagate, and confirm there are no copies. If there are copies, repeat all the steps!

YOU DO NOT need to erase your contacts. Not sure about iGust's work-around, but that's unnecessary. And christina44, I actually think this is a different problem. All my copies were on the correct date.

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Answer 9

iGust

Level 1

0 points

Oct 24, 2012 8:06 AM in response to jsml

Nice sharing jsml.

I've tried ur way, over and over again bcos the copies still showing up. Gave up.

But now all of the sudden it disappeared. Don't know why, just wanna say "Yay!".

Regards,

iGust 🙂

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Answer 10

jsml Author

Level 1

20 points

Oct 24, 2012 2:06 PM in response to iGust

Same here. That's why I said smth about repeating over and over until it works. Weird.

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Answer 11

dotmom61

Level 1

8 points

Oct 26, 2012 6:05 AM in response to jsml

I've recently been experiencing the same problem, and it does seem related to Google's Birthday Events that are loaded from your Google Contacts. Every single birthday was listed about 37 times on Calendar on my iPad (gen 3; iOS 6.0).

A few things about how I have my calendars set up:

I use iCloud
I have multiple calendars in iCal and they are all being sync'd via iCloud
I also use Google Calendar, and I have subscribed to various Google calendars through iCal. They show up on my iPad
I not only have an iCloud account set up on my iPad, but I had also at some point set up a Gmail account.

I used the following steps. All duplicate entries were removed and haven't returned *yet* (it's only be a few minutes )

Deleted my Gmail account from settings -- As far as I know, this is only used by the Mail app, so I'm not sure this is a necessary step, but I wanted to make sure there was no other avenue for the duplicate entries to find their way to my calendar.
Backed up iCal on my MacBook. <-- Please make sure you do this in case anything goes awry!!!!
Made sure all calendars were present at https://www.icloud.com/#calendar
On the iPad, went to Settings>iCloud and turned Calendars OFF -- when prompted what to do with the data, I chose to delete.
Closed Calendar on the iPad.
Waited a minute or two and turned Calendars back on through Settings>iCloud.
Re-started the Calendar app and all duplicate birthday entries from Google's Contact birthdays were gone! 😀

I still subscribe to several Google calendars, and everything still seems to be working correctly.

A few things to note:

This problem started occurring over the past week or so. In that week, I've done two things that seem unrelated, but they're the only thing I've changed that affected my calendar. They are:

* Linked my Facebook account to the iPad. Entering your account information when prompted forces you to accept to add Facebook events & friends. I subsequently went into Settings>Facebook and turned off Calendar and Contacts.

* Started using Remember the Milk, including subscribing to that list via Google & iCal. Therefore, that calendar now shows up on my iPad.

Neither of the actions above *should* have affected anything, but indeed, that's when I started having multiple birthday entries from the Google contacts birthday calendar.

I hope this helps someone else ... it was a pretty simple solution. I'll update if the birthdays return!

Message was edited by: dotmom61

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Answer 12

jsml Author

Level 1

20 points

Oct 27, 2012 8:56 AM in response to iGust

Ok. Well. My birthdays have not returned in repetition, BUT NOW MY HOLIDAYS are repeating like crazy!!!

Ugh.

I subscribe to the Apple holiday calendar and the same thing is happening where if I hide the Holiday calendar in the app, it still shows numerous repetitions.

I concur with dotmom that the birthday troubles began several weeks (?) after upgrading to ios6 and I had connected to FB, but I don't think that was related. ???

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Answer 13

Nov 13, 2012 5:34 PM in response to jsml

I have tinkered around with this and can reproduce the problem. I believe it is a bug in iOS with regard to syncing the "Contacts' birthdays and events" calendar through the Gmail account on your device. When you sync this calendar a new event is added to your device's calendar, but it somehow ends up being associated with the default calendar that you selected in your settings. With each successive sync of that calendar a new event is added and this is why the multiples appear. The number of multiple entries is the same as how many times you've synced the calendar. The same thing can be reproduced with the US Holidays calendar as well, so it seems to be related only to Shared Calendars in Google calendar.

I haven't found a workaround or fix yet. Right now the only option seems to be to turn off the "Contacts' birthdays and events" at https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect

Use the inbuilt "Other/Birthdays" calendar instead. I sync contact information between iPhone, Gmail and Facebook using apps like Contacts Sync, so all my Gmail and iPhone contacts are identical and the birthdays are in my iPhone contacts. You can still use iCloud to backup and access your contacts if you use the syncing app.

Now to remove those multiple entries. Turn off (uncheck) the "Contacts' birthdays and events" at https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect. Now on your device go into Settings/Mail, Contacts Calendars, select your Gmail account, turn off the calendars and select "Delete from my iPhone". Now open the calendar app (the multiples are still there), select "Calendars" at top left, click the little blue arrow at the right of On My Phone/Calendar, and select Delete Calendar. Now go back into Settings and turn on the calendars on your Gmail account again. The duplicates should be gone. You can go and turn on the Other/Birthdays calendar in the calendar app now if you hadn't before. You may also need to set your default calendar again in Settings/Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Let me know how that goes.

Hopefully apple will come up with a fix for this bug, which seems to have been ongoing for a couple of years now judging from all the posts about it all over the web.

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Answer 14

d4dammit

Level 1

4 points

Nov 19, 2012 7:16 PM in response to jsml

This solved my duplicates... lets hope they stay away...

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Answer 15

denhor

Level 1

16 points

Dec 2, 2012 7:48 AM in response to jsml

I got the same problem, which I believed came out after I added Google Contacts account in the Mail, Contacts, Calendar section in the Settings.

I reviewed the iPod Touch User Guide and found this caveat:

"Important: Don't sync items in th Info pane of iTunes *such as contacts, calendar, and notes) if you use iCloud to keep that nformation up to date on your devices. Otherwise, you might see duplicate items."

How relevant is this message to our problem here? I am sorry I cannot easily understand or follow what is being said in that quote. English is not my tounge. :-) Thanks.

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