<URGENT> All Active PayPal Subscriptions Expired

Discussion in 'Troubleshooting' started by steveric, Dec 31, 2012.

  1. steveric

    steveric New Member

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    Imho it's not done that the helpdesk of a software company like Amember is closed during several days! :mad: Probably 1000's of marketers rely on this software to run their membership sites. Why doesn't Amember check the helpdesk and forums - even if it was only once a day - to at least deal with critical/urgent issues like this one?

    This is imo very poor customer service just like it is very poor programming practice to use a specific date as RECURRING expiration date and then not taking into account what would happen when that date is finally reached!

    We run a software company ourselves and are available 365/7/24. I can't imagine what would have happened if we took off from 31/12 till 01/04 (like Amember) leaving our customers - not knowing what was happening because they couldn't login in our site - on their own during several days. Probably a lot of cancellations would have been the result!

    We detected the problem during new year's night (!) and luckily we could solve the problem on new year's day thanks to some clever people here in the forums. Thanks Skippy and other people here for providing proper instructions! Thanks Amember for being so great in being unavailable during these days! Hopefully you'll learn from this mistake!
    relapse likes this.
  2. steveric

    steveric New Member

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  3. skippybosco

    skippybosco CGI-Central Partner Staff Member

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    Larry,

    Did you upgrade an older site to 4.x? I don't believe the 2012-12-31 date issue is anywhere in the 4.2.14 codebase. If it is in the database it must be from an older imported record?
  4. skippybosco

    skippybosco CGI-Central Partner Staff Member

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    Before we run off with pitchforks against aMember support, this was addressed by aMember in a an upgrade in 2010. Folks running into this issue are most likely running very outdated versions of aMember.

    That being said, aside from those that are technically running into difficulties executing the steps required, is there any other issue pending on this?

    Let me outline the FULL steps involved in correcting:

    1. Back up your files and database before you make any changes!
    2. in amember/product.inc.phpchange:
      Code:
      define('RECURRING_SQL_DATE', '2012-12-31');
      to
      Code:
      define('RECURRING_SQL_DATE', '2036-12-31');
    3. Your payment plugin may also need updating.

      For example if you use Paypal look for all occurrences of 2012-12-31 in amember/plugins/payment/paypal_r/paypal_r.inc.php and change to 2036-12-31.

      This edit will be similar for other payment plugins (similar file name as well such as amember/plugins/payment/clickbank/clickbank.inc.php)
    4. in amember/admin/mass_subscribe.php change all occurrences of 2012-12-31 to 2036-12-31
    5. in amember/templates/member.html change all occurrences of 2012-12-31 to 2036-12-31
    6. using PHPMyAdmin run the following SQL script:
      Code:
      update amember_payments set expire_date = '2036-12-31' where expire_date = '2012-12-31'
      Note: If you have users that would naturally have expired on 12-31-2012 then you may need to manually adjust them to expire.
    7. In some cases you may find that it is necessary to run the RebuildDB to ensure your 3rd party scripts are in sync with the updates.
    8. Lastly, be sure to clear browser/cache/cookies and restart when testing to ensure you are not testing using stale session data.
    If anyone is still having issues please let me know and I'll do whatever I can to assist you.
  5. skippybosco

    skippybosco CGI-Central Partner Staff Member

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    I'm not sure much more can be done by aMember staff on this issue. The sites can be manually patched and updated, as indicated, or admins can upgrade their sites to newer versions of the aMember codebase that have this issue resolved.

    As I mentioned previously, if there are admins that are having trouble executing the steps let me know and I will do what I can to assist.
  6. skippybosco

    skippybosco CGI-Central Partner Staff Member

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    While the forum is very helpful for getting questions answered, it does not replace the support system which can be found here:

    http://www.amember.com/support/contact
    relapse likes this.
  7. alexander

    alexander Administrator Staff Member

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    Hi everyone,
    First of all I want to apologize for this issue, and want to say thanks to skippybosco who developed instructions for the fix.
    This post have everything which is required to fix that issue: http://www.amember.com/forum/thread...subscriptions-expired.16032/page-4#post-61848
    Also as was mentioned earlier, this issue was fixed for paypal payments many months ago, and latest v3 doesn't have it.
    If you have any problems implementing fix, please send ticket to helpdesk with "URGENT" in subject. I will cover this for you.
  8. mmehrle

    mmehrle aMember Pro Customer

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    Appreciate the apology but I really think you guys dropped the ball here on the customer support front. You should have proactively contacted all 3.1.x hosts and notified them that this issue was pending ahead of time. I for one was caught in the middle of this and it ruined a well deserved holiday I was planning to spend with my family.

    I have written you an email separately making additional points and I hope you will treat it constructively. In a previous life I ran several IT teams in fortune 500 companies, so I know a thing or two about customer support and QA. I hope the webmasters caught in the middle of this were able to get their systems fixed without losing subscribers in the process.

    Thanks again to everyone who contributed here in the forum while amember support was missing in action.
  9. skippybosco

    skippybosco CGI-Central Partner Staff Member

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    To play devil's advocate here, most software companies have end of life support for older/outdated versions of their code. This issue was resolved by aMember in 2010. Only sites that are running older/outdated versions were impacted by this issue.

    As far as I'm aware aMember does not "call home" and report back the version of aMember running on any given site (client checks but does not report back) so the notion of "proactively contacting all 3.1.x hosts" is not necessarily feasible.

    Could there have been a system wide alert/notice, certainly. Would it have prevented some being "caught off guard", probably not since if their environments are this out of date many are also not monitoring the changelogs/alerts/forums, etc. As I'll discuss a bit further down in my reply, there were numerous discussions of this issue in these forums (and how to fix it) dating back to 2010.
    I responded and identified a preliminary fix for the issue within 6 hours of it first being posted in the forum. I further followed up with a full step by step instruction on how to resolve the issue and publicly offered and assisted multiple admins in private who were unable to follow the steps themselves due to lack of technical know how. (note: it took, on average, less than 5 minutes per site to correct)

    Incidentally the fix I provided was from a referral to two existing threads in the forum that explained the issue and how to fix it that were posted in January 2012 and February 2012 that I found by searching for '2012-12-31', but in that same search result there are other posts that date back to 2010 that specifically call out the issue.

    Now the elephant in the room that I think everyone SHOULD be more concerned with, and aMember has hopefully corrected in v4, is the notion of any kind of a time bomb like this that relies on a specific far future time which can eventually lead to problems.

    That being said, I've set up an appointment in my calendar to send me an reminder on December 01, 2036 so that I can post an announcement here in the forum for any admins still running a patched version of aMember 3.1.x and the steps required to patch it to run till 2060. ;-)

    In all seriousness, as I don't mean to make light of the situation, believe me I know it does suck to have downtime and having customers negatively impacted. I also want to try and curtail some of the sensationalism that tends to brew around situations since it was a known issue for some time with a known fix (both in updated code, and steps to fix).
  10. hunteridge

    hunteridge New Member

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    One other issue:

    I have updated according to skippybosco (thanks!).

    When I do a search for a member, on the resulting search results page, the Status shows Expired

    When I click on the Payments link, I then see that the last payment made shows the account is Active.

    Where do we change code to correct this?

    Thanks.
  11. dschwa

    dschwa Member

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    We followed the method prescribed in this thread yesterday. Our tech replaced “2012-12-31” with “2036-12-31” in every file mentioned. This resolved the issue for people that were incorrectly set to expire and could not access our content but we are still noticing some odd behavior.

    Today several of our subscriber’s payments were recurring as expected and their payment record was displaying differently than it has previously. For everyone that recurred today and a new signup, the “Period” column is saying “01/03/2013 - 02/03/2013” when in the past it would say “01/03/2013 - RECURRING”. Because of this they had two active subscriptions for the day and we had to go in and manually edit the subscription end date to “2036-12-31” for it to display as recurring. Also, the recurring subscribers previous period started on “12/03/2012” and ended on “01/03/2013” when in the past it would end on “01/02/2013”.

    Has anyone else experienced this? Is there any way to resolve beside having to manually edit each persons subscription as they signup/recur??
  12. skippybosco

    skippybosco CGI-Central Partner Staff Member

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    Hmm... I've not seen this behavior.

    Out of curiosity have you run a RebuildDB? Also, did you update the amember/templates/member.html file? What version of aMember are you running?
  13. skippybosco

    skippybosco CGI-Central Partner Staff Member

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    What payment provider did they use to make the payment? Did you adjust that payment file to reflect the new far future date (ie. paypal_r.inc.php, clickbank.inc.php, etc)
  14. dschwa

    dschwa Member

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    Thank you for the reply. We are using PayPal exclusively. We have updated the "paypal_r.inc.php" file to include the new date of 2036-12-31.
  15. alexander

    alexander Administrator Staff Member

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    Have you upgraded paypal plugin to latest version as well?
    From what I read it looks like plugin itself was upgraded. In latest v3 it doesn't set subscription's expire date to "RECURRING" but it calculate correct expiration date(for example 1 month for monthly subscripion)
  16. alexander

    alexander Administrator Staff Member

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    hunteridge, you have to run Rebuild DB. this will fix user's status issues for sure.
  17. dschwa

    dschwa Member

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    Alex, I will check with our team on the PayPal plugin upgrade to see if we are on the latest version. What concerns me is that this was working correctly prior to the 2012-12-31 bug so even if we are using an outdated version of the plugin I'm unclear how this resolves the issue.
  18. dschwa

    dschwa Member

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    I was told that this section of the code in the "paypal_r.inc.php" file is displaying our version

    Release: 3.1.9PRO ($Revision: 4811 $) "Revision: 4811" being the PayPal version. Is that correct? If so, what is the latest version??
  19. alexander

    alexander Administrator Staff Member

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    Yes plugin from 3.1.9 should work exactly as you explained in your message:
    That is extected and there is nothing wrong.
  20. hunteridge

    hunteridge New Member

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    Skippy, it seems to have corrected itself somehow. Maybe my local computer cache still had the Expired status in it.

    Thanks for quick reply.

    M

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