Support

January 7, 2025 at 3:15 am

Hi there,

So, I’ll prefix this by saying that the notice doesn’t actually apply to you, as it’s for EE4 and NOT EE3. The system we use to send out notices is the same system used for plugin updates, so it just sends the notice to any plugin that checks for updates with our server.

On EE3, the payment methods will continue to work as they do now (you can safely ignore the notice)

EE3 is considered our legacy product and no longer receives updates other than security-related bugs. If any of those PMs suddenly stop working, the official answer from Event Espresso would be that it is time to move to EE4 (the EE3 codebase is showing its age now; that’s one of the reasons we originally moved to EE4 and redesigned the database schema when doing so).

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However, I’m also going to answer your question here as it relates to EE4, so it applies to any future readers of this thread.

The notice anyone will be seeing today was our ‘last’ notice. We’ve be pushing various notices about the deprecated payment methods since October 2024 and a ‘catch-all’ system-wide notice in December 2024. As a side effect of that, EE3 users have also received this notice (hence this thread).

So to answer this:

I just wanted to clarify: the notice we got that PayPal payment methods are deprecated as of Jan 15 – that does NOT mean they will suddenly stop working on January 15, correct? I am assuming it means that the methods are outdated and will no longer be supported or guaranteed to function as expected, correct?

This is incorrect; we’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work well.

The deprecated payment methods within EE4 will stop functioning on that date; they will be deactivated within EE4. The admin within EE4 has shown large and (IMO) unmissable notices about this. Those notices are dismissable. They show if you have one of the deprecated PMs active, but EE allows you to dismiss the notice. Then, on Jan 1st, we started showing a large, red notice that could only be removed by deactivating the affected payment method.

PayPal Commerce has replaced PayPal Standard, PayPal Express and PayPal Pro and supports the same features of those others in a more modern and secure way. If we simply leave those within the codebase and advise people to move, they either won’t until there’s a major issue with it or will continue to use it (people still to this day use PayPal Standard within EE4 and we officially deprecated that payment method years ago) so then we kinda encourage the use of end of life, outdated APIs by doing so. As these are payment-related APIs handling payment data we don’t think it’s a good idea to do so, it also means you (the site admin) are not PCI Compliant as your using end-of-line, ‘outdated’ API’s (which most don’t see as an issue as you won’t even notice/see it until there’s a problem and then it will become a big issue for the website admin/owner).

Auth.net have deprecated the AIM and SIM protocols so those have been replaced with the Auth.net Accept payment method.

Note – these changes aren’t something we chose/wanted to do ourselves, but with API’s being deprecated, we are following the guidelines to use the latest version of the API we can.