PayPal Instant Payment Notification Warning?

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  • sross
    Senior Member
    • Mar 2004
    • 660

    #46
    I applied the fix earlier in this thread and no longer get the warning. I have also continued to get subs without issue for a while now..

    Comment

    • freqfly
      New Member
      • May 2006
      • 25

      #47
      Hey sross - Which fix did you apply? The one in post 19 or post 27?

      I'm convinced something has changed on the Paypal side. My subscriptions were working flawlessly for over 3 years, then suddenly they stopped working. Nothing has changed on my server or vb installation. Very frustrating!!

      I'm waiting to hear the official VB response to this issue. I'm surprisded there isn't more discussion of this problem.

      Comment

      • sross
        Senior Member
        • Mar 2004
        • 660

        #48
        post 19 seemed to work for me..

        Comment

        • freqfly
          New Member
          • May 2006
          • 25

          #49
          I'll try that too. Thanks for your help

          Comment

          • LdyG
            Member
            • Jun 2007
            • 43
            • 3.7.x

            #50
            Thank you for clarifying.

            I wasn't sure if that fix was permanent or not but right now.. any port in the storm will do. I checked to be sure that was the code was the same one I have in my template and have now added my website's info per post 19 to my PayPal account (there wasn't any url there btw). If it doesn't work I'll try dropping the "forum" part but for not I used http://www.(inserted my website name).com/forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal (our forum uses the default singular "forum")

            Fingers crossed... I'll update whether it works or not in a day or two. Thank you again. I truly appreciate the help.

            Comment

            • K4L
              Senior Member
              • Jun 2006
              • 120

              #51
              Yup the post #19 worked for me.

              I changed(in your template)
              <input type="hidden" name="notify_url" value="$vboptions[bburl]/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal" />
              to
              <input type="hidden" name="notify_url" value="http://www.mysite.com/forums/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal" />

              I also enabled IPN in my paypal profile settings then
              put in the same gateway address.


              that fixed it.

              Comment

              • David Grove
                Senior Member
                • Apr 2008
                • 3507
                • 5.5.x

                #52
                I have spent considerable time investigating this issue, and it appears to be related to changes on Paypal's end of the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) system. (1) Paypal recently started sending email warnings to Paypal account holders when there are IPN failures, and (2) Paypal has recently started disabling accounts after there are too many failed IPNs. This means that the failures are not something new, but that just recently some people have started receiving the warning emails and Paypal has started disabling IPN after too many failures.

                If you are receiving the IPN failure emails or your payments seem to have stopped working, please do the following to troubleshoot:

                Important: These troubleshooting steps have been superseded by the newly revised troubleshooting steps found in post #69. Thanks!
                1. Check your Paypal IPN settings (in your Paypal account) and make sure that IPNs are not currently disabled. If they are disabled, then contact Paypal to get them re-enabled. You can check if IPNs are disabled by checking your IPN history and seeing if your recent IPN messages have a status of "disabled". (My Account => History => IPN History)
                2. Check your Paypal IPN settings and make sure your Notification URL is empty. This needs to be empty 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) The other reason this needs to be empty, is that 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 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 (/).

                Another thing to note is when the transaction log in the Admin CP shows “failure” for a transaction, that does not mean that the Paypal IPN failed, it only means that the transaction was not a charge or a reversal.

                So, to the best of my knowledge, this the explanation for why some of you have started to see these failure emails. If any of you have more information on the issue, please let me know and I will continue to investigate.

                I will now attempt to address a few things:

                Originally posted by dm_fan
                I our case, we have a subscription setup in vB that you can pay for with paypal. Plus we also have a number of items listed on ebay which people use paypal to purchase.

                I've looked at the subscription logs in vB and at the IPN log in our paypal account. They both show that anytime any payment is made to our paypal account, paypal's IPN system is trying to send the notification to our vB server. If the payment is for our vB subscription, it gets validated right away (just like it should). If it's a non-subscription payment, the IPN fails because vB doesn't see a valid subscription. So paypal trys to sent the notification again and again and again, with the same failed result. Apparently this has been going on for years because I have a log full of failures going back to when we began the subscription option on our forums.
                Originally posted by Mike Robinson
                My investigations revealed a further problem in that Paypal is sending IPNs for payments received in the Paypal account which which are not Forum subscriptions. These inevitably always appear as 16 failures both ends and are indicated in the forum transaction log as invalid_subscriptionid. Does this mean I have to have the Paypal acouunt dedicated to forum subscriptions and nothing else? I think I'll have to ask Paypal about whether it is possible for the IPNs to be selective and only sent for subscription payments.
                If you remove the Notification URL in your Paypal account, this should be fixed, since Paypal will then only send IPN messages to vBulletin when specifically asked to do so. If you have your vBulletin URL in the Notification URL setting in Paypal, then all transactions will be sent to your vBulletin installation. See item #2 above.

                Originally posted by Mike Robinson
                In my Paypal account I examined the IPN history and see that for most (but not all) successful transactions (marked 'sent') there is a 'failed' item related to the same transaction, each with 16 retries. The transaction log in vB admin CP shows all these retries as 'failures'. The interval between retries increasing from less than a minute to 24 hours, the last about 4 days after the first.
                Can you go to your IPN history and click the linked "Message ID" for one of the failed messages, and post the details found there? I specifically want to look at the Notification URL, the HTTP Status code, and the IPN Message found there.

                Originally posted by K4L
                I changed(in your template)
                <input type="hidden" name="notify_url" value="$vboptions[bburl]/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal" />
                to
                <input type="hidden" name="notify_url" value="http://www.mysite.com/forums/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal" />
                .
                What is your Forum URL set to in your vBulletin options? (vBulletin Options => Site Name / URL / Contact Details => Forum URL)
                Last edited by David Grove; Wed 3 Mar '10, 7:19am.
                ~~~~~

                Comment

                • cbiweb
                  Senior Member
                  • Apr 2004
                  • 2658
                  • 4.1.x

                  #53
                  I removed the Notification URL in my Paypal and got this warning: "You must enter a properly formatted URL into the Notification URL field in order to activate or deactivate Instant Payment Notification." It won't allow me to save my IPN settings without a URL.
                  So I removed the URL and chose the "Do not receive IPN messages" options, clicked Save, and got the same message.
                  So I clicked the Cancel button, which took me back to the original IPN page, and I clicked the "Turn off IPN" button, and had to confirm that I will no longer receive IPN messages from PayPal.

                  So where does that leave me? Will the vBulletin system still work?
                  ~ Life isn't always fair, but you can be. ~

                  Comment

                  • LdyG
                    Member
                    • Jun 2007
                    • 43
                    • 3.7.x

                    #54
                    Thank you for the help.

                    Check your Paypal IPN settings (in your Paypal account) and make sure that IPNs are not currently disabled. If they are disabled, then contact Paypal to get them re-enabled. You can check if IPNs are disabled by checking your IPN history and seeing if your recent IPN messages have a status of "disabled". (My Account => History => IPN History)
                    No failures listed.. not disabled.. It looks like all payments that were supposed to go through did so and yet I've gotten two of these msgs so far.

                    Check your Paypal IPN settings and make sure your Notification URL is empty. This needs to be empty 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) The other reason this needs to be empty, is that 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 IPN for your account due to the failed IPNs.
                    I've taken the url back out again and tried to save it. Same msg as above poster and I can't take it out. Should I leave the IPN enabled or disabled? It's enabled ATM.
                    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 (/).
                    It didn't have the slash but it didn't have "www" in the url so I added that in. I don't know why I didn't have it in. I know it normally needs to be there. Could that have caused a problem?

                    Comment

                    • LdyG
                      Member
                      • Jun 2007
                      • 43
                      • 3.7.x

                      #55
                      I got another one of these msgs last night so having the url put in (http://www. mywebsite.com/forum/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal) and adding the www under Options didn't help. I'm now stuck because I can't save it as Enabled or even Disabled on PayPal w/o a url to send it to and the one I put in apparently isn't correct.

                      From what I've read on the PayPal site (HERE) it looks like I could turn it off but then I'd have to check PayPal every day to keep an eye on who has donated, etc.

                      Thanks in advance for any help.

                      Comment

                      • David Grove
                        Senior Member
                        • Apr 2008
                        • 3507
                        • 5.5.x

                        #56
                        Originally posted by LdyG
                        I've taken the url back out again and tried to save it. Same msg as above poster and I can't take it out. Should I leave the IPN enabled or disabled? It's enabled ATM.
                        It didn't have the slash but it didn't have "www" in the url so I added that in. I don't know why I didn't have it in. I know it normally needs to be there. Could that have caused a problem?
                        If you have the Notifications URL set in your Paypal account, you will potentially have problems if you receive any payments that are not related to your vBulletin subscriptions, or if the vBulletin Notification URL were ever to change in the future. To fully remove the Notification URL from Paypal, (which I recommend you do), just turn IPN off in your Paypal account. This way you don't have a Notification URL hardcoded in your Paypal account, but since vBulletin sends an explicit Notification URL along with each transaction request, your vBulletin installation will still receive the notifications and work correctly. To turn IPN off in Paypal, go to My Account => Profile => More Options => Selling Preferences => Instant Payment Notification Preferences => Turn Off IPN.

                        Another note to those of you who are seeing Notification URLs that end in /subscriptions/paypal.php This was the URL for IPN in previous versions of vBulletin. The current URL is /payment_gateway.php?method=paypal (I believe it changed in v3.5.0).
                        ~~~~~

                        Comment

                        • vitrag24
                          Senior Member
                          • Aug 2006
                          • 309

                          #57
                          AGAIN GOT 3 SUCH EMAILS.
                          and 2 were due to caqncellation of subscription by user after signing up for subscription and 1 was for non-vbulletin forum subscription.
                          so this error isnt danger zone accoridng to me, just misinterpretation from paypal..vbulletin guys shd look into it and release fix for it..paypal might have updated it's software which is causing such problems..
                          If U Think Ur Life Getting Necrosed,Ur Dreames Inflammed,Ur Thoughts Thrombosed,Then Try This Out.Spread D Neoplasia Of Love Around U.
                          V.H.SHAH

                          Comment

                          • LdyG
                            Member
                            • Jun 2007
                            • 43
                            • 3.7.x

                            #58
                            turn IPN off in your Paypal account
                            Thank you for your continued help. I've turned it off.

                            Comment

                            • David Grove
                              Senior Member
                              • Apr 2008
                              • 3507
                              • 5.5.x

                              #59
                              Originally posted by vitrag24
                              AGAIN GOT 3 SUCH EMAILS.
                              and 2 were due to caqncellation of subscription by user after signing up for subscription and 1 was for non-vbulletin forum subscription.
                              so this error isnt danger zone accoridng to me, just misinterpretation from paypal..vbulletin guys shd look into it and release fix for it..paypal might have updated it's software which is causing such problems..
                              Have you already completed the three troubleshooting steps from post #52? If not, please try that.

                              Originally posted by LdyG
                              Thank you for your continued help. I've turned it off.
                              You're welcome, please let me know if this fixes the problem or if you continue to have issues.
                              ~~~~~

                              Comment

                              • Nick
                                Senior Member
                                • Feb 2008
                                • 3507
                                • 3.8.x

                                #60
                                So, David, it seems that your recommendation is to just turn the thing off completely. I went to my IPN history page and this is at the top: The IPN feature is turned off. You must turn on IPN in order to create history data.

                                If it's already off, then why am I still getting the notification/error messages sent from PayPal? I have no clue if subscriptions are going through or not...
                                Regards,
                                Nick

                                Comment

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