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PayPal Instant Payment Notification Warning

  1. Hi - I 've just got a warning email from paypal with the following:

    Please check your server that handles PayPal Instant Payment Notifications
    (IPN). Instant Payment Notifications sent to the following URL(s) are
    failing:
    http://www.mydomain.co.uk/?page=gf_paypal_ipn

    although the payments exist in paypal and the entries are up to date with transaction ID's, date and amounts in my GF entries page.

    I also have a problem that the return url doesn't seem to be functioning as after the payment the user is directed back to the blank payment form. I thought I had things set up sandbox OK, but now I'm live there seems to be a problem.

    Please can anyone shed any light on this, my client doesn't wish to have her paypal account disabled. I also have a second site with the exact same setup with the same problem with return url.

    cheers

    Will

    Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday March 28, 2012 | Permalink
  2. My Return URL issue seems to be sorted now, but i've received another warning from paypal that the IPN is failing - although all transactions appear in my gForm entries, and match those in the paypal account.... I'd rather not have my clients paypal account suspended ;-)

    cheers

    Will

    Posted 12 years ago on Thursday March 29, 2012 | Permalink
  3. I was just notified of this same problem on a client's site. The full content of the email message from PayPal is (with their actual URL replaced with "example.com"):

    Please check your server that handles PayPal Instant Payment Notifications (IPN). IPNs sent to the following URL(s) are failing:

    http://www.example.com/?page=gf_paypal_ipn

    If you do not recognize this URL, you may be using a service provider that is using IPN on your behalf. Please contact your service provider with the above information. If this problem continues, IPNs may be disabled for your account.

    Thank you for your prompt attention to this issue.

    Do you have any advice on correcting this issue? Thank you.

    Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday April 17, 2012 | Permalink
  4. If your entries are marked as "Completed", the IPN handler did not fail, so I am wondering what is going on. One thing you can do is log into your PayPal account and go to Profile -> IPN History. Take a look at the IPN History and let me know if there are any IPN's that have failed or are in "retrying" status

    Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday April 17, 2012 | Permalink
  5. Just had the client check their PayPal account. They do, in fact, have 2 transactions from the last 24 hours marked as "Retrying" in their account.

    Any suggestions?

    When I try to go directly to http://www.example.com/?page=gf_paypal_ipn (again, replaced the client's actual domain with "example.com") in my browser, I just see the website's home page. Am I supposed to see something else?

    Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday April 17, 2012 | Permalink
  6. What we need to do is:
    1- enable logging for the PayPal Add-on. You can do that by going to the PayPal's settings page and adding &debug=1 to the query string. Your URL should look something like the following "http://yoursite.com/admin.php?page=gf_settings&addon=PayPal&debug=1"
    You should then see an option to enable debugging. Go ahead and change it to "Log all Messages".
    2- Take a look at your web server's log and see if you can find the errors from the IPN message from PayPal

    Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday April 17, 2012 | Permalink
  7. I noticed you included "admin.php" in the URI you provided. Is that supposed to be part of the IPN callback URI, or is that a typo?

    In the meantime, I'll have the client add &debug=1 to the IPN callback URI. Thanks.

    Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday April 18, 2012 | Permalink
  8. We modified the IPN notification URL earlier today to include the debug switch. So far, I haven't seen any additional information in our error log. I did see a handful of errors related to the User Registration add-on (which we had enabled, but weren't using, so I disabled it).

    I also found that the Bad Behavior was causing issues with the form (when someone clicked "Pay with PayPal", instead of being taken to PayPal, they would sometimes get a 403 error), so I disabled that. I'm not sure if that might have also been causing the PayPal IPN errors or not.

    I'll let you know when I have more information. Thanks.

    Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday April 18, 2012 | Permalink
  9. After a few days of watching things, it looks like the plugin Bad Behavior was causing our issues. With it disabled, everything appears to be working properly now that we have that disabled. Thanks.

    Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday April 24, 2012 | Permalink
  10. Right on, thanks for letting us know - ironic name too!

    Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday April 24, 2012 | Permalink

This topic has been resolved and has been closed to new replies.