PayPal IPN Notification Stops Working « Gravity Support Forums

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fastpipe
Member

This has occurred once before and I shrugged it off as not important. However, because it's happened a second time, I need to figure out exactly what's causing the problem. I upgraded to the latest add-on a week or so ago and the latest Gravity Forms plug-in a few days before this problem showed up.

We take donations using the PayPal add on. We have three different forms for different scenarios, but the one that gets the most traffic is one where people donate and are sent download links so they can get some documents we offer. This is a pretty straightforward form that has been in place since before the Donation and Subscription fields were consolidated in Gravity Forms 1.5. I have made no changes to it and it's worked very well. I also just tested the other two forms and we're not receiving IPN notifications from PayPal on those forms either.

Yesterday at around 8:50 a.m., a transaction was processed and worked exactly as expected where the payment status was "Approved." Every transaction since then has not received the IPN notification and shows up in the Gravity Forms exported entries as "Processing."

In the past, I always thought that "Processing" meant that someone had filled out the form on our site, but had not completed the transaction at PayPal; that is apparently not the case. Nothing has changed on our dedicated server that would cause this problem to start yesterday and PayPal, of course, shows that the transaction is complete. When I tried to resend the IPN notification, PayPal says it was resent and that the server response was 200/OK, but the entry in Gravity Forms is not updated.

Presumably, the users never received the e-mail with the download links because I have the "Send user notification only when payment is received." box checked because I don't want to give them access to the downloads if they don't complete the payment with PayPal. I also have the "Send admin notification only when payment is received." checked and that's how I discoverd this problem because we hadn't received any Gravity Forms notifications for the transactions from the last day, but had received e-mail notifications from PayPal.

This has happened at least once before and I'm certain there are other transactions that are listed as "Pending" that were actually finalized. When it happened before, it magically started working again a few days later. With "processed" payments still pending, I need to come up with a system where I can reconcile what we receive via PayPal with the entries in Gravity Forms. Any thoughts on what is causing this problem? cURL is working and the whole thing was working fine until yesterday when, as near as I can tell, no changes were made to our system. I know there are other threads on this same issue, but again our configuration was working until yesterday.

Also, it would be helpful if the documentation for the add-on had a description of what the Payment Status values (processing, approved, refund, others?) in the exported form entries mean.

Thanks,

Dennis

Posted 12 years ago on Monday January 30, 2012 | Permalink
fastpipe
Member

And once again, after about 48 hours or so, it's all working again. Now I have to manually go in and reconcile about 50 donations to match up the Transaction IDs between Gravity Forms and PayPal.

Posted 12 years ago on Tuesday January 31, 2012 | Permalink
sc0ttkclark
Member

I noticed this happened too, does this plugin track all IPN posts or handle orphan IPN at all? It was limited to one payment, happened about 4 minutes after the form was submitted. In PayPal, I see "Custom" field set to the 1234|MD5string format, so something must have happened along the way from PayPal back to the site. Cart looks like it was correct, so this wasn't a manually sent payment either (no one bypassed the PayPal cart GF utilizes).

Posted 12 years ago on Sunday February 5, 2012 | Permalink
fastpipe
Member

It was very inconsistent over the weekend. Some transactions went through perfectly and my forms were notified while others went through PayPal, but there was no IPN notification.

Posted 12 years ago on Monday February 6, 2012 | Permalink
sc0ttkclark
Member

I wonder if there were issues with PayPal itself that did not send back IPN notifications, maybe that's the case and no amount of logging would be able to know whether a user really paid or not (if IPN fails to come through at all). I'll check out the new logging options in the latest release of the add-on to see if it helps me find what's going on for future occurrences.

Posted 12 years ago on Thursday February 9, 2012 | Permalink
Carl Hancock
Administrator

Gravity Forms processes IPN requests as they come in. I'm not sure what you mean by orphaned IPN requests.

If IPN doesn't communicate back to Gravity Forms then the entry is never going to be updated because it's the incoming IPN request that updates the entry and tells Gravity Forms it has been paid.

So the issue could be a variety of things in this situation. It could be a problem on PayPal's end not sending the IPN, it could be a problem on the server end not accepting the IPN request, it could be a problem with the IPN request being rejected. There are quite a few moving pieces here.

There are new logging options in the Gravity Forms PayPal Add-On v1.4 release which can be enabled to help debug issues related to IPN as Scott mentioned above. I would suggest enabling this, and then you can get with us when there is an issue and we can look at the logfile with you to help determine what is going on.

To enable debugging in v1.4 of the PayPal Add-On:

- Navigate to the Gravity Forms PayPal Settings page in your WordPres Dashboard. Not the PayPal Feed, the PayPal settings area of the main Gravity Forms Settings (Forms > Settings > PayPal).

- Once on the PayPal Settings page, append &debug=1 to the URL in your browser's address bar and hit enter to load the page passing that appended query string parameter.

- This will display a new PayPal settings option for Debugging. Change this setting to Log All Messages (there is also a Log All Errors, but best to be safe).

- Save the Settings.

Now the PayPal Add-On will create a logfile and log all IPN interaction, including errors. It creates the logfile in the wp-content/plugins/gravityformspaypal folder itself and calls the file log.txt.

This was done quickly because IPN issues are common so we just wanted to get something available to get logging in place which is why it is a hidden feature. We plan on expanding this and enhancing the logging functionality and introduce an Add-On specifically for debugging which will incorporate logging for other Add-Ons in one debug tool.

I would enable this, then keep an eye on what is going on and if you notice any IPN issues you can refer to the log file and see what is going on. Once you have an issue to look at in the log file you can get with us and we can help determine what is going on.

Posted 12 years ago on Thursday February 9, 2012 | Permalink
zihzo
Member

I had this problem while using quickcache and w3tc if the index page is compiled as an html page...

Posted 12 years ago on Saturday February 11, 2012 | Permalink
hypergolica
Member

I am having similar problems. I receive the email from Paypal once the transaction is complete, but not the email from Gravity Forms.

IPN is on; URL inserted on the Paypal side. "Send user/admin notification only when payment is received," is checked on the Gravity Forms side.

I've activated the debug as indicated above.

Also, I notice that zihzo mentions the cache... we're running the "wp super cache" plugin. Could there be a connection?

I'll report back after some tests...

Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday February 22, 2012 | Permalink