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I've done as David recommended (disabled IPNs in my Paypal account) but this now means the subscriptions are no longer dealt with at the vB end. I have just received a subscribed donation this afternoon and whilst the payment has been received by Paypal and I have been notified by Paypal about it, the subscription has not been added automatically at our Forum end (as it did before even though it was followed by all the IPN failures). There is no entry in the transaction log and I have had to add the subscription manually. I do not wish to do this every time we get a subscribed donation. So where do we go from here?
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Okay, things are going weird.
My IPNs were already disabled (see my post above), so I haven't made any changes. I decided to test a subscription and it worked fine. vB automatically promoted the account to the proper usergroup, added the transaction to the log, etc. The one thing it didn't do, however, is send an e-mail to me. Usually I get an e-mail notification when a new paid subscription is made. Why didn't this occur?
Also, I just checked the transaction log and there are a ton of failures. I looked at them and they're all for one person's renewal (recurring subscription); it's not going through or working. So why aren't recurring subscriptions working? This is money that is being lost, and I have no idea why this issue has come up out of nowhere.
Never-mind regarding this second issue. I read that if you change the cost/value of a recurring subscription, then the older ones wouldn't be able to update.Last edited by Nick; Sun 28 Feb '10, 11:57am.Regards,
NickComment
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We had the same messages not long ago. They disappeared after went to My Account => History => IPN History and clicked around a little, saw this message: "The IPN feature is turned off. You must turn on IPN in order to create history data", ad enabled it. (I had never turned it off.)Comment
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Yea, this is just ridiculous whats going on here. I've lost out on over 800 bucks because this thing is so f***ed up.
I've gone to my Paypal account > Profile > More Options > Instant Payment Notification > This has my notification URL (since I can't get rid of it) > I went to the IPN History page and I resent all the disabled messages that didnt go through. Nothing happened.
I went to my Transaction Log and saw that every one of those I resent in Paypal came back as a Failure.
This is what I get
APIvb_error_codeunhandled_payment_status_or_typeComment
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For Nick and Mike Robinson: (Mike I already sent this to you in a PM)
When vBulletin submits the transaction to Paypal, it is accompanied by a parameter called notify_url. The notify_url value tells Paypal to send the IPN to that URL, regardless of the enabled/disabled status of IPN on the Paypal side. However, if the value of notify_url were wrong, then vBulletin would not receive the IPN from Paypal. You can check if the value of the notify_url parameter is correct by going to your IPN history in Paypal (My Account => History => IPN History), clicking on the linked "Message ID" for a transaction, and checking if the Notification URL is correct. The Notification URL should be http://your-domain.com/your-path-to-vbulletin/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal
Another thing you can do to verify that the Notification URL is correct is to go to your Paid Subscriptions page, choose a subscription and click "order", then on the following page you have the option to order using Paypal. View the source code of this page in your browser and search for the text notify_url. You should see code like the following:
I suspect that email not getting sent is unrelated. Are you running vBulletin in a shared hosting environment, or on a server that otherwise limits the frequency and volume of email you can send?Code:<input type="hidden" name="notify_url" value="http://your-domain.com/path-to-your-vb-installation/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal" />
To the best of my knowledge and according to all the testing I've done, Paypal IPN is working correctly with vBulletin, so I think something else must be going on here. For one of the IPNs that your just resent, can you click on the link "Failure" in the vBulletin transaction log and post the details here for me to inspect? If you don't want to post them here, you can send me a private message, just be sure to link back to this thread so I can keep track of things. Thanks.~~~~~Comment
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I've been following this thread closely in the hope that a solution would appear, but clearly this is a very simplistic view.
I have explored every angle whether it be with paypal, VB or my host. I've scrutinised the failed IPN's and notice that they all feature http error code 503. I feel I have a good understanding of how the IPN setup works, or should work.
So I asked my host (Host-it, formerly 4 sure) to reconcile my failed IPN transactions with their error logs against my site. they reported the following...
I've had a look through the access logs for the site, and I can see a number of connections that gave a 503 response for that url.
66.211.170.66 - - [01/Mar/2010:19:38:42 +0000] "POST /**forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal HTTP/1.0" 503 314 "-" "-"
66.211.170.66 - - [01/Mar/2010:19:39:41 +0000] "POST /*forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal HTTP/1.0" 503 314 "-" "-"
66.211.170.66 - - [01/Mar/2010:20:08:11 +0000] "POST /*forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal HTTP/1.0" 503 314 "-" "-"
66.211.170.66 - - [01/Mar/2010:20:08:23 +0000] "POST /*forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal HTTP/1.0" 503 314 "-" "-"
66.211.170.66 - - [01/Mar/2010:20:08:47 +0000] "POST /*forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal HTTP/1.0" 503 314 "-" "-"
66.211.170.66 - - [01/Mar/2010:20:09:31 +0000] "POST /*forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal HTTP/1.0" 503 314 "-" "-"
66.211.170.66 - - [01/Mar/2010:20:10:54 +0000] "POST /*forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal HTTP/1.0" 503 314 "-" "-"
66.211.170.66 - - [01/Mar/2010:20:13:37 +0000] "POST /*forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal HTTP/1.0" 503 314 "-" "-"
66.211.170.66 - - [01/Mar/2010:20:18:59 +0000] "POST /*forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal HTTP/1.0" 503 314 "-" "-"
66.211.170.66 - - [01/Mar/2010:20:29:41 +0000] "POST /*forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal HTTP/1.0" 503 314 "-" "-"
I believe it is most likely something in the board code that is returning an incorrect response when paypal posts to the URL.
This may of course be a red herring - most of the stuff we post is..... But can we start ruling out the hosts - I'd like to ask if anyone out there blighted by this issue is NOT with Host-it, if we're all with Host-it, it may be an issue with them, which frankly I doubt, but we really need to get a grip with this because it's costing me fortune, and cheesing off a lot of my members.
There is then the small issue of making me look like a total idiot.
Maybe if we all answer these two questions a common theme may just appear.
1- are you with Host -it
2 are you using Paypal Business or Premiere
Craig Davies"Live in England and subject yourself to the punishing taxes of envy. It's hard to be a winner in a society dedicated to the glorification of losers."Comment
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This is a mess
I've got the same problem too - following this thread intently hoping for some kind of solution. My website depends on subscriptions and donations and this screwing up my automatically recurring subscriptions AND my upgrades. NOT HAPPY.Comment
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We are not with Host-it and we are using Paypal Business.
This problem seems to be effecting people in different ways. Nick in post #62 says he has disabled IPNs and the subscriptions are working fine which seems to confirm what David says about disabling IPNs. But this is NOT my experience.
Since I disabled IPNs a few days ago following David's recommendation, subscriptions are no longer being dealt with properly at the vB end. We have had two subscriptions in the last 2 days and whilst the money has been successfully added to our Paypal account, vB has not acted upon the subscription (updating the user account, added the user as a subscriber, etc.). I've had to enter the subscriptions manually but it is not always easy to identify the user from the notification I get from Paypal about the payment (in one case I had to look at Paypal's IPN history to find the user name buried in the details for that particular transaction).
Curiously, even with IPNs disabled, there are entries for the transactions in IPN history, the only difference is that they are not being sent to back to our Forum. So to me it seems logical that the IPNs must be enabled to get them sent to our Forum so that the updating that is necessary can be carried out at the vB end. Why does the vB manual give instructions to enable IPNs in the Paypal account if it is not necessary?
I go back to my first post in this thread (#15) in which I said I feel the problem is that vB is not sending the correct response back to Paypal within the requisite 30 seconds. I feel all the attention to the notification url is a red herring (at least in our case). I am sure our notify_url is correct because when IPNs were enabled, our Forum was obviously receiving them. But Paypal kept sending them presumably because it did not get acknowledgement of their receipt. vB correctly dealt with the first IPN it received for each transaction but seems to have ignored all the subsequent retries from Paypal which is why there are 16 failures following each successful transaction in the Transaction Log.
I feel we must get vB to send the correct response back to Paypal to stop Paypal keep retrying to send the IPNs. Also if vB would send back a response to ALL IPNs it receives, even if it is not related to a subscription transaction, it would overcome the problem of having a series of failures following other unrelated payments made into the Paypal account.
MikeComment
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I apologize that you're having these problems, and I am doing my best to try to identify if this is a problem in vBulletin, which if we can determine that, will be fixed as soon as possible.
Up to this point, I have not been able to identify anything that vBulletin code is doing wrong in respect to Paypal IPNs. (But I am still actively trying to see if anything is wrong with vB code)
Can you check the following three items? (this is a revised version of what I posted in post #52)
- Check your Paypal IPN History page (in your Paypal account) and make sure that IPNs are not currently disabled. Note that disabled is different than turned off (more on that later). To see if IPNs are disabled, check your IPN history (My Account => History => IPN History), do a search for recent IPNs, and see if your recent IPN messages have a delivery status of "disabled" (Look for Delivery status Disabled). If they are disabled, then contact Paypal to get them re-enabled. Until you do this no IPNs will work.
- Check your Paypal IPN settings and make sure IPNs are turned off (not disabled) for your account. To check this, visit your IPN History page (My Account => History => IPN History); it should say: "The IPN feature is turned off. You must turn on IPN in order to create history data." If instead of that message, it shows a field with your Notification URL, then you need to turn the feature off. This needs to be off because (a) it is not necessary, since vBulletin sends Paypal the correct URL to send the IPN to along with the payment request.* (This is the notify_url parameter in the subscription_payment_paypal template). (b) If you have your vBulletin URL there, then Paypal will send IPN messages for all of your Paypal transactions, not only the ones that originate from your vBulletin installation. This will eventually cause Paypal to disable (see point #1) IPN for your account due to the failed IPNs.
- Make sure your Forum URL is correct in your vBulletin settings. (vBulletin Options => Site Name / URL / Contact Details => Forum URL) It should be the URL to your forums, with no trailing slash (/). The notify_url parameter is generated using this setting.
* Paypal will send the IPN message even when the IPN feature is turned off in your Paypal account [reference]
The difference between "turned off" and "disabled" is confusing. I'll try to clarify:The IPN message will always be sent to your notification URL unless receiving IPNs have been disabled. Even though you have not enabled receiving IPN messages in your Profile or you have reset your preference by turning off IPN messages, PayPal still sends IPN messages to the notification URL you specify for a specific payment.
Turned off -- This is if you choose to turn off the IPN feature in the Paypal interface.
Disabled -- This is an automatic Paypal sanction that is applied to accounts that have too many failed IPN messages. (has nothing to do with you turning the IPN feature on or off)Last edited by David Grove; Thu 4 Mar '10, 12:52pm. Reason: clarifying the difference between turned off and disabled.~~~~~Comment
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Can you get me a link to your PHPinfo? (or an admin cp login for your site) I want to make sure you have cURL or fsockopen available on your server. vBulletin does send a 503 response to the IPN in two situations-- if the IPN does not originate from Paypal (Paypal responds that it's an invalid IPN), or if vBulletin cannot get a response from Paypal to verify the IPN. For the latter case, vBulletin uses cURL or fsockopen to post a request to Paypal, and if neither are available, there will be problems.~~~~~Comment
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Mike, I replied to your PM concerning this. Basically, I think IPNs are disabled for your account, as opposed to being turned off. I originally confused the two (in post #52), but have given clearer instructions in post #69. Let me know either way if this resolves the problem or not. Thanks!~~~~~Comment
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"Live in England and subject yourself to the punishing taxes of envy. It's hard to be a winner in a society dedicated to the glorification of losers."Comment
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IPNs enabled but still turned off sounds very confusing to me but I am trying to follow your instructions. From what you say it seems I must ask Paypal to enable them because if I try to enable them myself from the IPN history page it turns them on as well as enabling them. And as we have found, we cannot turn them off without disabling IPNs.
So yesterday I sent an email to Paypal support to ask for IPNs to be enabled on our account but remain turned off and they seem to have completely failed to comprehend my request (as I say, it is all very confusing to me too). This morning I had a reply to say they checked my account and my appeal for the limitations to be removed from my account has been granted and I can now use my Paypal account to send and receive money. Great! There was no problem with that before. As far as IPN is concerned nothing has changed which I verified by making a test subscribtion myself on our Forum.
I have just sent a support ticket through the Paypal Merchant Technical Services system to request the same as I did by email yesterday. I'll report back when I get a response.
There must be an easier way to get the subscriptions working properly!
MikeComment
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Ok, I've just got the following response from Paypal:
Sorry David, I'm afraid it's back to you.Hello Michael,
unfortunately it is not possible to have IPN enabled on your account and still remained turned off.
Most likely there is an error in the Script which handles IPN. This is most likely an issue with the vbulletin mod you are using.
I am also running vbulletin forum during my spare time and there can always be compatibility issues e.g. if you upgrade or a module changes.
You should ask the mod Developer about this issue as he is programming the module.
Best regards,
Patrick
MikeComment
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