Update - This is most definitely a RTM issue. The unwelcome "Tasks for..." events are listed in my calendar for 2 years; from Nov 16, 2007 to Nov 15, 2009. The RTM checkmarks exist between Nov 17, 2007 to Nov 17, 2009. Coincidence? I don't think so. Again, those events were created between 10pm CST last night and 8am CST this morning.

The First Quarter, New Moon, etc seem to occur forever...no end in site to those events. I never created them, but I don't know if they're related to this issue. They too are affixed to my personal calendar.

arr me too.

And RTM for Gmail is nowhere to be seen. What's up?

riddel, I would recommend contacting Google Calendar support regarding this issue.

The display of these special types of events (both the RTM feature and Google Calendar's own moon phases feature) is handled by Google Calendar -- if both of them have started displaying incorrectly, Google support should be able to help with this.

Hope this helps!

This is happening to me too. Why would this be a Google issue? The only RTM product I use is the Gmail addon, nothing to do with my calendar!

The RTM addon should not have any access to my calendar.

by the way, this is all over the Google calendar help group. RTM is getting the blame.

Regardless. There is a task check mark showing up for everyday in the calendar, even when there is no tasks for that day. This isn't very lifehacking... I don't want to have to click on everyday to see if I have any tasks only to have it respond no tasks due today when the async call returns from the RTM servers.

To clarify, RTM does not have access to your calendar; the RTM gadget is shown on the calendar via a web content event subscription (the same as the moon phases feature in Google Calendar).

If the "Tasks for Wednesday (Jan 16)" etc tasks are showing as actual events in your calendar, RTM did not add these -- this is either an issue with Google Calendar (in which case Google should be able to help), or possibly an issue with a third party syncing tool (which shouldn't be trying to sync a subscription anyway, but if you're using a sync tool, please check with the developer about this issue).

As the first poster mentioned, this issue happened with both the RTM feature and the moon phases (a Google Calendar feature) -- so it seems like this issue is not specific to RTM, but rather a general issue with web content events for some users.

Hope this helps!

Really? So let's take a look. When I take a look at the calendar details for RTM it's using a URL of http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/googlecalendar/ics.rtm

When I go directly to that link and look at the content of that file I see (starting at the top of the file):

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
X-WR-CALNAME:Remember The Milk
PRODID:-//Remember The Milk//rtm.Service.iCalendar.Export 3.0//EN
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20071119
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20071120
SUMMARY:Tasks for Monday (Nov 19)
CLASS:PUBLIC
TRANSP:OPAQUE
STATUS:CONFIRMED
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-TITLE:Tasks for Monday (Nov 19)
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-ICON:http://static.rememberthemilk.com/img/modules/task.gif
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-URL:http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/googlecalendar/?s=20071119
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-TYPE:text/html
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-WIDTH:332
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-HEIGHT:255
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20071120
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20071121
SUMMARY:Tasks for Tuesday (Nov 20)
CLASS:PUBLIC
TRANSP:OPAQUE
STATUS:CONFIRMED
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-TITLE:Tasks for Tuesday (Nov 20)
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-ICON:http://static.rememberthemilk.com/img/modules/task.gif
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-URL:http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/googlecalendar/?s=20071120
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-TYPE:text/html
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-WIDTH:332
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-HEIGHT:255
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20071121
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20071122
SUMMARY:Tasks for Wednesday (Nov 21)
CLASS:PUBLIC
TRANSP:OPAQUE
STATUS:CONFIRMED
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-TITLE:Tasks for Wednesday (Nov 21)
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-ICON:http://static.rememberthemilk.com/img/modules/task.gif
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-URL:http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/googlecalendar/?s=20071121
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-TYPE:text/html
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-WIDTH:332
X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-HEIGHT:255
END:VEVENT

[snipped here for brevity]

I see an event for every day. How is this googles fault?

As mentioned above, the RTM gadget is shown on the calendar with a web content event subscription.

The iCalendar file referenced above doesn't contain actual calendar events, but rather web calendar events (which simply tell Google Calendar to display the icons on each day). The "X-GOOGLE-CALENDAR-CONTENT-TITLE" and related properties tell Google Calendar how to handle this file. Google has more details on this special iCalendar format for web content events here.

This feature never adds actual events to your calendar (and in fact has no access to do this). If you're experiencing problems with web content events (either RTM or Google Calendar web content events such as moon phases), unfortunately all I can do is recommend contacting Google support as this feature is handled on their side.

Hope this helps.

hey guys, I had the same problem along with others at the gcal forums

I do not know the cause but instead of who's fault it is, lets try fixing it. If you do not want to delete every task individually (would be a nightmare!) i found a way to delete all of them.


First and very important step SAVE your main calendar ( wherever the
tasks for (day name) shows up).

Next download sunbird and addon for the google calendar provider
extension
put in the login name /password will allow you to access calendar from
sunbird

Next do a search for "tasks for" and select all future events.

All the events show up and now select all and delete them

The cleaner calendar should sync back to gcal and the events should be gone.

Hope that helps

I did this and it works GREAT! Thanks radsqd!

Thanks radsqd, that worked well.

Anyone have any more idea as to why this happened?

I have the same problem, actually.

It started several days ago when I was getting an email reminder from Gcal giving me "Tasks for...". I thought nothing of it until I was getting it every-single-day. Realizing that I hadn't logged into Gcal itself for about a week or so, I checked this morning... and voila, a "task" entry everyday. This is not cool whatsoever. My uneducated guess is that it may be the Firefox extension "RTM for Gmail", but it doesn't offer any access to options... but it could have potentially saved Gcal login info and posted a task for every day.

I dunno, but I hope this gets cleared up and figured out soon...

Here's the service that's added all the rogue events:
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/googlecalendar/

RTM, please help us figure this out! The RTM calendar does not display in our list of calendars, so there's now no way to delete it, meaning there's no way to delete all these tasks that I've decided I don't want without going to each and every day and deleting the 'tasks for' event for that day.

The Sunbird fix above didn't work for me, as somehow Sunbird freezes every time I try to open it and access my google calendar, and I've uninstalled and reinstalled twice now.

I've spent an hour and a half on this problem today already, and that's a lot for the type of person who cares enough about doing things efficiently to use RTM.

I would hope you'd be willing to, and would have better success with, contacting google support about a problem that's consistent across probably hundreds of your users at least, as opposed to each of us contacting google separately to find a fix.

This may be the same situation. However, I keep receiving the following TM: "Tasts for Sunday (Nov 25) @ Sun Nov 25, 2007 (RTM) has been cancelled. I believe this is the example I played with when I first signed up with RTM about two weeks ago. I am now getting an SMS daily regarding this deletion. Is this the same problem as above?

Many thx in advance!
w.

I can delete them but then new ones appear instantly after the last one so they're always exactly 200. Someone at http://groups.google.com/group/spanningsync/browse_thread/thread/6812437d402159bd wrote he deleted his RTM account and it stopped the spam.

Someone at google has finally responded today, and to me everything still indicates that it's nothing that google can fix--it's RTM putting out strange events for some reason. The only suggestion google has is to delete your 3rd party account that seems to be providing these events.

http://groups.google.com/group/google-calendar-help-bugs/browse_thread/thread/99471857f0949ca7/a03a6114bacfd42b

When this came up a few weeks ago, I just deleted by hand the next 100 or so days' worth of events, so I'm ok for a few weeks more. The songbird fix never worked for me, as I could never get it to load all events without freezing, so if RTM doesn't help me out in the next couple weeks, I'll be getting rid of it.

RTM, please tell me how to _not_ show these "web content events" to my google calendar without having to delete my RTM account. Please?

Thanks!

blakeweb, Becky from Google posted:

"It sounds like most everyone reporting this is also using a third party sync application, which could be responsible for adding these events to your Calendar. If you haven't already, I recommend (temporarily) disabling any third party programs you've installed and reach out to the developers of these sync apps directly for more info on this odd behavior."

RTM is not a third party sync application for Google Calendar, and Google is not referring to RTM in the post. I mentioned previously that it was possibly an issue with a third party syncing tool, and Google has now confirmed this as a possible cause.

As Becky said, I would also recommend contacting the developers of any sync apps you may be using with your Google Calendar account to find out why this is happening.

Hope this helps.

Just wanted to mention, if you'd like to remove the Remember The Milk for Google Calendar web content event subscription anyway:

1) In Google Calendar, click on "Manage calendars" (at the bottom of the "My Calendars" panel on the left).
2) Locate the "Remember The Milk" calendar (it will be listed under "Other Calendars").
3) Click the trash can on the right to delete the calendar.

Please note, however, that unsubscribing from this subscription (or even deleting your RTM account) may not resolve the issue with the additional events (which could possibly have been duplicated from this subscription by a third party sync tool, so removing the original subscription may not help).

As I said in my previous post, I would recommend contacting the developers of any sync apps you may be using with your Google Calendar account to find out why this is happening.

Hope this helps.

I was wondering whether it would be a good idea to add some guidelines for posting on this forum, e.g. that you should include basic information about your system, add-ons, setup etc.

In this 'informed' thread, Emily proposed the most likely explanation very early on, i.e., a synchronization application. (It seems that writing access to the main google calendar is essential). If the following posters had included which synchronization application they were using (if any), the problem cause might already have been identified. Instead, we are left with doubts concerning the posters reading comprehension.

Thanks-a-lot radsqd,
Your sunbird solution has helping bring back my calendar to an un-violated state.

The Sunbird solution worked for me. Thanks! Is there any chance that Plaxo could be to blame for this? They have task functionality as well.

Hi Emily,

I understand that this is most likely a Google issue, but maybe you could be a little pro-active and contact Google on your user's behalf. It's obviously issue that's causing a lot of grief for the RTM community.

Hi Emily,

My last post sounded pretty frustrated, and I apologize for that. I basically gave up on trying to solve the problem quickly and instead spent however long it took just deleting the calendar items from every single day for the upcoming 6 months, which didn't take as long as I was afraid it would.

I appreciate the clarity of your last couple explanations, and it looks like I misunderstood who the 3rd party syncing app in question would be.

I don't any longer have a 'remember the milk' calendar showing in my list of calendars, so as you described I must have some other 3rd party making a mess of my google calendar. Problem is, I must have signed up for that months before those everyday events started showing up on my calendar, and now I have no idea what service it could be.

Do you have any big list there at RTM of different services out there that people might be using to sync you with other services?

Thanks, and sorry for the inaccurate finger pointing.

blakeweb, no problem.

The issue wasn't actually caused by an application that syncs with RTM (our own MilkSync for Windows Mobile is currently the only app that syncs with RTM).

The issue was more than likely caused by a third party sync application for Google Calendar, which managed to incorrectly attempt to sync the RTM calendar subscription in Google Calendar -- so the problem happened between Google Calendar and a third party sync app (which we have no control over, so unfortunately couldn't do anything about this).

I don't have a list of all the sync applications for Google Calendar, sorry, although I know that there are a number out there. I don't know if you happen to remember any Google Calendar sync apps that you might have tried out before the issue happened, but hopefully whichever third party app caused the issue has fixed the problem by now (at least, we haven't heard any new reports).

Hope this helps.