A fifth PIR site launches, and the events calendar's real root cause gets found
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A fifth committee site
publicrelations.psychedelicsinrecovery.org joined newsletter. and publications. as the third
dedicated committee portal — each a lean WordPress install a committee can manage on its own,
without needing access to the main or service sites. Part of a longer-term plan to bring all of
PIR’s web presence into a shared look and feel while keeping day-to-day ownership split by
committee.
While setting it up, a DNS cleanup pass turned up a small inconsistency worth a mention for
transparency: publications.psychedelicsinrecovery.org currently has two separate DNS records
pointing at two different (but both valid) addresses — the site works correctly either way, and
we’re checking with our host whether that’s intentional before touching it.
The events calendar’s real root cause
The events calendar was switched off site-wide after bot traffic was found overwhelming the
server (covered in why the site got
slow) — a necessary stopgap, but not a full
explanation. Digging further found the actual mechanism: a caching setting that controls whether
pages with a web address like ?eventDisplay=month&date=... can be cached at all was switched off
sitewide. With it off, those pages — which is exactly how the calendar’s “today,” “this month,” and
specific-date views work — get rebuilt from scratch on every single visit, whether that visit
comes from a bot or a real person. The calendar wasn’t uniquely fragile; it just generated more of
these uncacheable pages than anything else on the site.
The fix is identified (turn that setting on, so common calendar views get cached and reused instead of rebuilt every time), but the control for it is currently locked in our caching plugin’s admin screen for a reason we haven’t pinned down yet — we’re working with our hosting provider to sort that out. Once it’s resolved and tested, the plan is to bring the calendar back.