Support

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.

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.