SMF Subscription

[jawad96]

Hi,

I have SMF subscription set up. I was wondering; if a user went to there Paypal and cancelled the recurring payments from within Paypal instead of through SMF, would they still be 'vip' on the forum. Basically, I want to know if Paypal lets SMF know that payments were cancelled or not.

Thanks 

[Sir Osis of Liver]

One of the things wrong with paid subscriptions is that there is no way for a member or admin to cancel a recurring subscription in SMF.  It must be done by the forum owner in the receiving PayPal account, or the subscriber in their PP account or credit card.  I believe PP posts an IPN to the forum if member cancels payment in their account, but SMF does not recognize it and the form handler throws an invalid transaction error.

It is best not to use recurring payments, it has caused all sorts of problems on many forums.

[Arantor]

Actually, if a member cancels it in PayPal, while it will throw the invalid transaction error, it will also cancel the subscription too, because the PayPal API notifies SMF every period to indicate that a payment was made, and in theory it should mean that no further notifications of payment occur (meaning it doesn't get renewed)

It definitely is buggy but should be better in the next version.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

That makes sense, the scheduled task would see the subscription is expired and dump them out of the subscriber group, assuming it is not buggered by the recurring payment flag.

[Arantor]

When I did some work on it for 2.1, I specifically updated it to notice subscr_cancel but to actually do nothing about it because there's nothing to actually do. Unlike, say, Google Wallet payments that requires calling on Google periodically rather than expecting Google to notify SMF.

[jawad96]

Ah okay, so in essence it should work albeit being slightly buggy then.