PayPal Instant Payment Notification Warning?

[Morrus]

^ PayPal assure me that this error won't affect user accounts/permissions etc.

It already has. To the tune of about a thousand dollars this month so far.

[gpzzone]

Hi Guys - just found time to revisit this, and unearthed the following at the Paypal Live Blog.

In true Paypal fashion it doesn't tell you a lot, other than there has been an issue... link to article.

Here's another little gem for those like me ( less knowledgeable) link to article

[gpzzone]

I'm involved with dialogue with Paypal, over this, and another issue.

Basically they've used an IPN simulator to produce these results when interrogating my site.

"..............And finally testing the URLs above, with an Instant Payment Notification (IPN) simulator I obtain these results:

IPN delivery failed. HTTP error code 404: Not Found using as IPN handler URL http://www.gpzzone.co.uk/httpdocs/***forum/payment_gateway.php
IPN delivery failed. HTTP error code 503: Service Unavailable using as IPN handler URL http://www.gpzzone.co.uk/***forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal

As your IPN history log is quite "messed up" in terms of Delivery status, Sent/Failed/Retrying IPNs can be in fact found in a single week range time, my guess is that your script/server location is having troubles and provoking then the issue itself......."

Messed up is an understatement!

Posted in the hope that it may ignite a spark of realisation somewhere.

[NickCat]

So I've made the changes suggested by David (to turn off IPN, no they are not disabled), and two transactions did actually go through. They were instant single one time payments for membership on my site (not recurring).

However... I'm still getting the following as a failure and not handled by vB:

vb_error_code unhandled_payment_status_or_type
GET
method paypal
POST
txn_type subscr_eot
subscr_id S-XXXXXXXX
last_name XXXXXX
residence_country US
item_name NASIOC Supporter Subscription
mc_currency USD
business XXXXXXX@nasioc.com
verify_sign XXXXXX
payer_status unverified
payer_email [email protected]
first_name Todd
receiver_email [email protected]
payer_id XXXXXX
item_number XXXXXX
custom ScoobyXXXX
charset windows-1252
notify_version 2.9
tax
payment_status
mc_gross
txn_id

I edited out any identifying information.

The user canceled their PayPal subscription for membership to the site, but vB has no idea how to handle it apparently. So these could easily stack up and cause PayPal to disable IPN again, right?

I disabled the recurring subscriptions about 6 months ago because they were terribly unreliable. Some users who were signed up before that point still have subscriptions that I'm slowly in the process of canceling at they get charged. So why doesn't vB know how to handle this sort of transaction. At this point I have two cancellations retrying over and over, and have about 14 failures for each of these unhandled transactions in my logs.

[sross]

haven't been getting them for a while and now they have started coming in again

[gpzzone]

I fancy I'm about to show my ignorance....

Given that the 503 server errors seem to be a regular feature of these IPN failures, my hosts, (HOST-IT) are investigating the issue further on my behalf, they have however asked me........

".....I've had a look into this, and to see why you may be getting 503's we'd need some post data, or to see the content tha the paypal server is getting.

If you can find out some dummy POST data (that should work of course) we can then try this, and see what the error may be in the returned page from the code."

Where and how do I get the information that they're requesting?

Please help, we may finally get to the bottom of this.

Thanks in advance

Craig Davies

[vitrag24]

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.

Samr thing happend with me..

i lost my 2 subscribers due to this problem.

[vitrag24]

subscription_payment_paypal template:
<input type="hidden" name="notify_url" value="$vboptions[bburl]/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal" />

Is this correct?

[vitrag24]

one user whose subscription completed "IPN" not sent and he's still in active subscription
one user whose subscription shd recurr, "IPB" not sent, so subscription isn't active instead of payment.

This IPN bug is making many complications.

Please tlel me wht to do in both this case..
can i manually cancel and add subscription or anyway to do it automatically by resending IPN anyway?

[vitrag24]

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)

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:

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)

due to number of ipn failures, IPN disabled on my paypal.

as u told to turn off IPN, i tunrd them off then it's showing disabled, and when i click on turn on, it's showing enabled.

i agree, there shd be difference between disabled and turn off, but no option to have same.

If we keep it on, it'll recognise wrong non-vb subscription url and failed and then disable again.


Only solution i concluded from all above feedbacks, turn it on, enter correct url, turn it on again when u got email it's disabled which will happen soon if u receive non-vb subscription payment too.

[gpzzone]

subscription_payment_paypal template:
<input type="hidden" name="notify_url" value="$vboptions[bburl]/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal" />

Is this correct?

I'd suggest it is, it's certainly the same as mine.

However, you need to check your VB options and make sure that your forum url is correct, and that there is no trailing slash.

[ilanyon]

So...are the vB team going to do something about this or what?

Well, logged a support ticket on this and its now been 5 days without a response...

Clearly there are a considerable number of people concerned about this issue and it would be nice if one of the vB team would chime in here and let us know what is happening to fix this issue...

[sross]

Well, I haven't touched anything and my warnings have stopped. Is anyone still getting them?

[Mike Robinson]

As I've said in a previous post, I seem to have stopped getting IPN failures for subscriptions to our Forum but still have them for non-subscription payments to the Paypal account. I don't know what will happen when a subscriber tries to cancel a subscription as that was also something that has created IPN failures in the past. However Paypal have stopped sending me warning notices about the IPN failures that we still do get for the non-subscription payments. Maybe that was because I disabled and then re-enabled IPNs a few weeks ago which I am surmising might have reset to zero the number of failures I've had in my Paypal account so if Paypal has a threshold level of failures before they start sending warnings it might be awhile before I start getting them again (only guessing). Or maybe Paypal realise there is a problem somewhere and have stopped sending them to everyone, hence the reason why it has seemed to have gone fairly quiet in here recently. Is anyone still getting the warnings?

But the problem has only partially gone away for me. We haven't heard from David Gore (vBulletin Developer) for ages. Is vBulletin still looking into this matter?

[jonsidneyb]

I was having the problem,

I now have IPN off and am still disabled but it is working now. I do not have anything set up as recurring.
It seems that IPN off and disabled will work.

I did talk to someone in Paypal's IT department and he told me from the looks of things this is not IP dependent for the transactions to work and the communication actually works though the code.

IPN off and disabled is working for me, when IPN is not disabled I run into problems.