Member Not Demoted

[HTMwebrat]

Greetings,

I've made a test member buy a 1 day, non-recurring Membership level, but by the 3rd day they still hadn't been demoted. I rechecked the button-code against a newly generated one (in case I made a mistake) but the settings were the same.

[Jason Caldwell]

Hi there. Did you configure IPN ( Instant Payment Notifications ) in your PayPal account?
IPN must be turned: On.

[HTMwebrat]

Yup, IPN is set to the URL listed in the s2 description areas. The logs are working as well.

[Jason Caldwell]

Thanks for reporting. Please attach your log file for review. I'll have a look at it. ~Thanks.
P.S. Also, please indicate when you established your PayPal account. Was it before or after Oct 15th 2009?

[HTMwebrat]

It's a sandbox account that as made within the last 2 or 3 months.
Thanks for checking.

[Jason Caldwell]

Thanks. The last subscr_eot notification that came in, according to your logs,
was for this Subscription ID: I-LKS0881DDLDP

The log shows that it was unable to demote/delete the User, because that ID was not found in the system. This happens whenever you already deleted them manually. For the sake of being thorough, can you please verify that you do NOT have a User account in your WP Dashboard with this PayPal Subscr. ID: I-LKS0881DDLDP

You can find this by going to WP Dashboard -> Users
and looking for the PayPal Subscr. ID in your list of accounts.

[HTMwebrat]

The test user with that ID is still in there. Is there a datestamp in the log of when it checked for the subscriber? I demoted it manually after 3 days or so from the 1-day purchase, then repurchased a Level 1 role for 3 days to see if that would work.

[Jason Caldwell]

At 21:20:29 May 05, 2010 PDT.

We will continue to look over your log, and compare to others we've seen & tested. However, it is always best to do your final testing in a live environment. Once you have the basics working, switch over to the live system. The Sandoox is always a bit screwy. It was designed to be a mirror of the live system, but it never has been.

[rossagrant]

Hi Jason,
I have just tested this by cancelling a test member who set up a daily recurring payment.
The next payment is due on the 8th (which in the UK is now).

Paypal has sent a IPN regarding this transaction but the status of the member has not changed.

The member didn't sign up until 11.52a.m on the 7th. Does that mean the EOT won't be sent until 11/52 a.m on the 8th or is the billing more general than that, ie. just on the 8th?

[Jason Caldwell]

Hi Ross. Just on the 8th, at some point.
I've never observed any precise ( to the second ) calculations coming from PayPal EOT's. That does not mean they won't though. Their system changes from time to time, and also from one PayPal account to another.

For anyone else reading this. The following is important to realize. I know Ross already understands this, but I just wanted to include this here to prevent confusion for anyone else.

Subscription Cancellations / Some Hairy Details With Dates
There might be times whenever you notice that a Members's subscription has been canceled through PayPal®... but, s2Member continues to allow the User to access your site as a paid Member. Please don't be confused by this... in 99.9% of these cases, the reason for this is legitimate. s2Member will only remove the User's membership privileges when PayPal® sends the SUBSCR_EOT notification via the IPN service. PayPal® will sometimes wait to send this SUBSCR_EOT notification until the User has completely used up the time they paid for. In other words, if a User signs up for a monthly subscription on Jan 1st, and then cancels their subscription on Jan 15th; technically, they should still be allowed to access the site for another 15 days, and then on Feb 1st, the time they paid for has completely elapsed, and PayPal® will send the SUBSCR_EOT notification to s2Member. At that time, s2Member will remove their membership privileges; by either demoting them to a Free Subscriber, or deleting their account from the system ( based on your configuration ).

[rossagrant]

It's 11P.M here in the UK Jason and the EOT as far as I can tell still hasn't been sent for the profile which I cancelled yesterday.

The subscription was a daily sub which started on the 7th at 11.52 A.M

I cancelled the subscription in the evening of the 7th so the user should have been downgraded to a subscriber sometime during the 8th I expect.

There was an IPN sent when I cancelled the subscription yesterday but where can I check if an EOT was attempted?

There is still an hour left of the day today though so it may happen soonish.
The Paypal account I am using is very new, only a couple of days old, so I don't know if these new accounts deal with things differently.

I absolutely need the plugin to look after demotions/ promotions on it's own though.

Any ideas on where i can check for the EOT being sent?

[rossagrant]

Okay it's now 1.05 A.M on the 9th May and the test member I cancelled is still showing Level 1 status and has not been demoted to a subscriber.

What do you suggest I check Jason? All settings are in place, Paypal is sending IPN's on transactions and I'm picking them up but just nothing on demotions. Where do I check for an EOT being sent?
Cheers
Ross

[rossagrant]

Really need help with this guys. Both me and HTMwebrat are having problems with demotions. It just isn't working. Where can I check if paypal sent the EOT?

Maybe it's something to do with the way that the newer Paypal accounts work. Please give us advice on what we can do.
Cheers,
Ross

[HTMwebrat]

It's been 7 days since I made an account set to expire in 3 days account, paypal can apparently have a lag time of about 4 days so I'll know tomorrow or so whether anything happens for sure. If paypal sends something I think the main sandbox test e-mail area might have a record of it.

[Jason Caldwell]

Hey guys. Sorry for the delayed response.

There are two places where you can see a log of IPN notifications.

1. Go to s2Member -> PayPal Options -> Enable Logging
Once logging is enabled, you can see a record of every IPN notification, along with all of the actions that s2Member took in response to the notification from PayPal. It will be located inside /wp-content/plugins/s2member-logs/paypal-ipn.log

2. Log into your PayPal account, and go to: History -> IPN History. This will provide a detailed report of all IPN notifications that PayPal sent to your server. PayPal also allows you to force IPN notifications to be re-sent.

As far as the reports on issues with subscr_eot notifications, we've not been able to reproduce this on our end yet. I'm not discarding your concerns about this, I just have not been able to reproduce the issue yet. It sounds like it could be related to newer PayPal accounts, where the behavior in IPN transactions has changed somewhat.

I'm still investigating this. At this point, I'm receiving conflicting reports from the PayPal support team on this matter, and since I've not been able to reproduce it myself yet, we're at a stand-still. If anyone else can provide me with their s2Member IPN logs ( paypal-ipn.log ), that would be a big help.

[HTMwebrat]

I looked under IPN History on the 5th and didn't see anything mentioning a cancellation. I haven't done any test transactions since the 7th so if something shows up today or tomorrow it'll be easy to spot in there.

[Jason Caldwell]

Thanks. Please keep me posted.

[rossagrant]

Cheers Jason,
I manually demoted my member in the end and have just used a modification button to upgrade him back to level 1 status on a daily subscription. I have just cancelled that and will see what happens tomorrow when the subscription runs out. Hopefully he'll be demoted. Am I okay to update to 2.9.4 in the meantime?

[Jason Caldwell]

Sounds good Ross.
Yep, you're good to upgrade. s2Member 2.9.4 fixes a couple of minor bugs, and adds support for a Double Opt-In Checkbox when List Servers have been integrated with s2Member.

[HTMwebrat]

No new test e-mail and no new IPN transaction from paypal, test user still has their status level. Should I be looking for the "expired" notification? A few pop up right after the payment, here's the IPN history for the last test membership:

[rossagrant]

webrat I'm still having this issue aswell. It looks like Paypal took away the EOT IPN messages in newer Paypal accounts. It's documented on their website, although they have mentioned that they may reintroduce the feature.

Jason is aware and working on a work around. Paypal does send out subscribe_cancel IPN messages when a subscription is cancelled but this wouldnt take into account any time a user still has left on their subscription.

i.e if they pay for a month and then 3 days later cancel, they wouldn't get the rest of month to access the site if this IPN was used to downgrade them.

I'm sure Jason will come up with something over the next day or so. FINGERS CROSSED!

[rossagrant]

paypal.com/mts

Just logged a massive complaint here about this change to the subcr_eot problem. I suggest we all do the same too. Don't know if it will get Paypal to bring the functionality back but it looks like thousands of people are reliant on it.

The developer of AMember is having the same problem as well as countless others. This really is poor play on Paypal's part.

[HTMwebrat]

Thanks for the update. Silly move by paypal. Does Wordpress have a cron that can be run to update things like this? That's how Drupal/Ubercart handles user expiry.

[rossagrant]

Here is Paypal's reply to my complaint.

'Hello Ross,

Unfortunately at this time information on why this is not added/been removed from the new subscription functionality has not been supplied. I have checked the product documentation and also found no information specific on the change other than it using the API recurring payment functionality which does not use that feature. I have forwarded your comments to the product integration team for review to see about adding this functionality to the new subscription flow and will post an update if/when the feature is added or some clarification on why it is not/can not be added.

Sincerely,
Justin
Merchant Technical Services
PayPal, an eBay Company'

Hardly fills me with confidence that we'll see the feature implemented anytime soon.

[Jason Caldwell]

We spent a great deal of time on this issue, so that future versions of s2Member would not be adversely affected by this policy change at PayPal®. s2Member v3.0+ works around the "new PayPal® account"/subscr_eot issue gracefully.

You can read the full Changelog for s2Member 3.0 here:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=97

# EOT bug fix & improvements. ( 2010 PayPal® accounts ). EOT = End Of Term. s2Member has been updated to support newer PayPal® accounts ( those opened after Oct 15th, 2009 ). Newer PayPal® accounts do NOT send an IPN/`subscr_eot` in all cases. This has been reported to PayPal® by several developers. At any rate, s2Member can deal with this gracefully now, by keeping a record of payments/periods/changes, and monitoring other signals sent by PayPal®. This allows s2Member to take control of the situation, at the appropriate time, using s2Member's built-in Auto-EOT System ( new ).

The communication from PayPal® -> s2Member is seamless ( once again ); even in PayPal® accounts created after October 15th, 2009. These changes will NOT negatively effect existing installations of s2Member. If anything, it will improve your experience. More importantly, if your PayPal® account was established in 2010, you will definitely want to upgrade to s2Member v3.0+.