De-Blued?

[Bradfo69]

So...... is my money no good anymore? I know I have a lot less than I did before joining this forum but... I still appear to be contributing according to the bank account.

"Houston, we have a problem."

[dsli_jon]

Hang-tight, Cap'n.. I will be seeing our Fearless Leader, shortly, and I will communicate your woes, directly.. I am certain it's some v-Bulletin-BS, and nothing 'sinister'.. I'm also certain that the Janitor will delight in the opportunity to thrust the equivalent of a meat-hook thru v-BS's nostrils, and *make* it do his bidding... If it were a flesh-and-blood being, I'd hate to be it in about 1/2 hr, let's just put it that-way..

j

[planters]

What is this all about?

[Admin]

I noticed a number of cancellations very recently. Thats been a "thing" for a few months now so I just figured "more than average" were done with the sub idea. Apparently not.

Ok, so I have a very rough idea of what happened here. Time is no longer a linear progression traveling at 1c/second...

Hear me out.

The last Vbulletin upgrade, as best I can tell by looking at the merged templates, changed nothing here and it stores it's own date value. Said date value is passed to Paypal at the inception of a subscription system and after a handshake that value is stored in some sort of temporal displacement field on paypals side.

The board then waits, all creepy like, for a confirmation from paypal every month that the transaction is clean and then moves it's next date forward x period of time determined by the subscription details.

Paypal transaction log data submitted through the API isn't smart and can basically be summarized as as a nod that a transaction went through and a timestamp to confirm the nod, *not* the actual transaction. This is then passed to vbulletin.

Vbulletin then looks at said nod and moves the proverbial goal post to some arbitrary time(hours) after expiration and then does all the accounting after the fact.

For some reason that I am not even remotely sure of, the paypal "date" got moved forward 5 days for a large number of people causing a disconnect where the subscription is valid as determined by paypal but inactive(deferred rebill) and consequently disabled locally.

So hey, "the 9th is the new 4th" appears to be what happened... For reasons I can't determine... and I'm starting to go a little bit nutty because I've spent way too much time eyeballing mutually incomplete transaction data on two separate sites that, apparently are going through a bad divorce because they sure as shit don't appear to talk to each other save for a terse one word reply once a month.

True story: Vbulletin doesn't pass the username in question to paypal, at all. This has been fun.

At this point I can force cancel sub details at paypal given that I can't move the date "back", which makes sense... I could see some "Big thinker"(Tm) abusing the crap out of that. However that still leaves the unalterable transaction details at vbulletin in place so it will then, x days later, rebill only to get a "nope, fail r you" reply from paypal which will then try to add a notation of a failed transaction to a supposedly clean account.

The transaction data here at PL is on an equally unalterable timer and I can't cancel something thats already cancelled(inactive) without breaking something.

So... I need to deal with this on a one by one basis or shell the entire subscription system by wiping all current transaction data and starting fresh since it appears that one side or the other(paypal most likely) screwed the pooch by moving transaction dates for unknown reasons.

Alternatively: It's possible that given the local data set is showing as "over" that a potential future rebill to paypal will reset the date by moving it to the newest rebill one. I need to test that. So... Thats what I am going to do for the next hour or so.

Given how quirky the data is so far I an rather adverse to pressing buttons and altering the data as it sits... I have no idea how it will react at this point... I would hate to complicate an already messy situation or worse, accidentally start double billing by moving dates around. At this point I can only guess that after vbulletin passes the data, paypal takes over the role of initiating a transaction and it would stand to reason that moving dates around here would potentially generate 2 "bill on" dates instead of a "bill on" and an "initiated on" date.

tldr; http://photonlexicon.com/lolhurr.png

[gashead]

I actually *think* (Don't quote me on that tho) I've been double billed a couple of times, but I've never raised it because the site / Spec deserves it.. you do a "propper top job" over in the UK we would describe you as a "Diamond geezer"

Cheers,

N.

PS: You should make Jon pay for you *both* to come to the next UKLem, lots of shits and giggles..


EDIT:

Spooky, just as I said that.. another one came out... I appear to be being billed on the 5th of the month and then the 6th of the month.

[Bradfo69]

Phew...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68ugkg9RePc

Thanks!

[Jem]

Everything's cool here, regularly getting billed on 4th of every month as far as I can tell

[csshih]

tldr; http://photonlexicon.com/lolhurr.png

I'm in.

Craig

[blowfly]

My blue sub was canceled yesterday. Should I set it up again or wait for the kinks to get worked out?

Thanks Robert!!
Mike

[Bradfo69]

Speaking of which... I know mine was cancelled so, wanted to see if it was o.k. to set it back up again. If so, where is the link? I'm not seeing it anymore.

Thanks!
~Brad

edit: Never mind, I found it and started it back up again.