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Peculiar missing registration

Posted: December 12, 2016 at 4:48 am

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dee4dogs

December 12, 2016 at 4:48 am

WP version 4.7
EE version 4.9.22.p

So this has happened to us twice now, and we can’t figure out why.

We have an event with 5 places.
We have four successfully completed (paid) registrations but the system has recorded five, and marks the event as sold out.

We added another space (upto 6) and saved the event. It saved successfully (gave the green bar at the top saying that the event status was updated to “Upcoming”).

Now checking back again… it’s back to sold out. You can see the 6 spaces, 5 sold and 4 registrations. Not quite sure what’s going on?

See screenshot http://www.dee4dogs.co.uk/D4D-EE-problem.png

Any help would be gratefully received.
Thanks


Tony

  • Support Staff

December 12, 2016 at 10:50 am

Hi there,

Which payment method do you use on the events?

Are all of the registrations currently on the event using the same payment method?


dee4dogs

December 12, 2016 at 11:52 am

Hi.
Since we installed back in February, all payments go through PayPal Standard. We have no other options enabled.

Occasionally, we do get clients saying that they get to the PayPal window and just get a spinning wheel – never been able to nail it down to any common factor.


Tony

  • Support Staff

December 12, 2016 at 4:31 pm

Thank you.

Do you mind if I take a look over the payment logs on your site to see if I can see any issues there that may cause this?

If not can you send temporary login details using this form:

https://eventespresso.com/send-login-details/

Occasionally, we do get clients saying that they get to the PayPal window and just get a spinning wheel – never been able to nail it down to any common factor.

When using PayPal standard if they get to PayPal and see a just a spinning cog, its an issue on PayPals side rather then your site. EE passess over the details to PayPal as it redirects them to PayPal, after that if something goes wrong your already on PayPals servers.

If you can check your servers error logs around the same time that EE shows the registration was created for a user that has reported the spinning cog do you see any errors (you may not be able to do this now, but something to note for the next report). I doubt you’ll find any errors logs if its normally working fine but it would be good to check.


dee4dogs

December 13, 2016 at 1:43 pm

I’ve sent through the login details.

We seem to have the exact same problem now on another event.

5 spaces.

4 completed registrations.
6 failed registrations.
5 tickets sold.
Event sold out.

Yet only 4 registrations.

http://www.dee4dogs.co.uk/courses/puppy-school-loughborough-11/
Event ID 538

I have now added another space to ensure that the event can still be sold on our site.

Thanks


dee4dogs

December 13, 2016 at 1:47 pm

TO be clear – all of our events have a “maximum number of tickets per order” of 1
Thanks


Tony

  • Support Staff

December 14, 2016 at 9:09 am

Ok I looked over all of the payment logs for the registrations on that event and there’s nothing that stands out.

What may be happening with PayPal standard is the user is hitting the site at the exact same time that PayPal is sending their IPN to update the payment within EE which is thn causing problems during the update and incrementing the sold value more than once.

Have you considered using a different payment method?

PayPal Standard will eventually be phased out of Event Espresso in favor of PayPal Express as it’s a more reliable so if you prefer to stay with PayPal I would highly recommend switching to PayPal Express.

A ‘better’ alternative to PayPal is Stripe as it works differently than normal offsite payment methods and again is more reliable than PayPal Standard.


dee4dogs

December 14, 2016 at 12:49 pm

I’m struggling to see how this is a PayPal issue.

There are registrations that are increasing the count and leading to events showing as sold out, despite the fact that they aren’t yet full. This is some sort of bug that is directly leading us to loose business.

Feel free to branch this next query into a new thread.

I’ve just tried to activate PayPal Express and failed.
I’ve added the Stripe plugin, tried to activate it and failed.

Both things did exactly the same – in the Payment Methods page I clicked the green button to activate the method, the page loads and the only thing on it is the standard WP menu down the left – the main window area is just blank grey.

I tried this on both Edge & Chrome… so don’t see it as a browser issue.

Thanks for your help.


Tony

  • Support Staff

December 14, 2016 at 2:01 pm

There are registrations that are increasing the count and leading to events showing as sold out, despite the fact that they aren’t yet full.

Events show as sold out when the sold value of the datetimes reache the limit set on those datetimes.

The sold value is not a count() of Approved registrations, as in it does not count your current registrations and display the count in the datetime sold value. The sold value is an integer stored on the datetime that is incremented/decremented when registrations are Approved/’un-Approved’ (set to any other status).

So you don’t have ‘phantom’ registrations being included here but it looks something has incremented the sold value more than once for one of those real registrations.

As your using an offsite payment method that sends an IPN back to the site to update the payment (PayPal standard) AND also POST’s back the transaction values when PayPal re-directs the users back to the site you have 2 possible requests that want to update the same registration/transaction at the same time.

We have multiple checks within EE which narrow the window for the race condition caused by the above but it could still be possible that both those requests hit the site at exactly the same time when using these types of offsite payment methods, if that happens it is possible for something like this to happen which is why I suspect its caused by using the PayPal standard payment method.

I’ve just tried to activate PayPal Express and failed.
I’ve added the Stripe plugin, tried to activate it and failed.

Sounds a fatal error is being thrown when loading the PM, do you have access to the servers error logs?

Or can you enable WP_DEBUG on the site using this snippet:

https://gist.github.com/Pebblo/8787f5530ea777c84aaf62f075e55b32

That will log errors but not display them on the site, once that’s been done I can test activating the Stripe payment method and see if any errors are logged.


dee4dogs

December 15, 2016 at 10:21 am

Server logs show two errors both related to an UpDraft backup – but nothing else.

Installed the code snippet as requested.

Did the same thing (trying to enable payment method) – but no log created…?

Thanks


dee4dogs

December 15, 2016 at 10:53 am

Disabled the “EE – Payment Methods Pro” plugin (version 1.0.0.dev.000) and the Payments options page started working properly.


Tony

  • Support Staff

December 16, 2016 at 5:23 am

I’ll need to investigate the problem with Payment methods pro.

In the meantime have you switched to using PayPal Express (or Stripe etc)?


dee4dogs

December 16, 2016 at 1:01 pm

Hi Tony,

Yes. We now have Stripe as the default option, Paypal Express as a secondary – all being served with our shiny new SSL certificate.

Test payments through the Test APIs all worked ok. So fingers crossed the experience is as smooth for our customers.

We’ll keep an eye on any more strange registrations/transactions/randomness.

Thanks for your help.


Tony

  • Support Staff

December 16, 2016 at 1:19 pm

Great, nice job 🙂

Please do let us know if you run into any further problems.

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