<URGENT> All Active PayPal Subscriptions Expired

Larry,

Did you upgrade an older site to 4.x? I don't believe the 2012-12-31 date issue is anywhere in the 4.2.14 codebase. If it is in the database it must be from an older imported record?

Before we run off with pitchforks against aMember support, this was addressed by aMember in a an upgrade in 2010. Folks running into this issue are most likely running very outdated versions of aMember.

That being said, aside from those that are technically running into difficulties executing the steps required, is there any other issue pending on this?

Let me outline the FULL steps involved in correcting:

1. Back up your files and database before you make any changes!
2. in amember/product.inc.phpchange:
   
   Code:

   define('RECURRING_SQL_DATE', '2012-12-31');

   to
   
   Code:

   define('RECURRING_SQL_DATE', '2036-12-31');

3. Your payment plugin may also need updating.
   
   For example if you use Paypal look for all occurrences of 2012-12-31 in amember/plugins/payment/paypal_r/paypal_r.inc.php and change to 2036-12-31.
   
   This edit will be similar for other payment plugins (similar file name as well such as amember/plugins/payment/clickbank/clickbank.inc.php)
4. in amember/admin/mass_subscribe.php change all occurrences of 2012-12-31 to 2036-12-31
5. in amember/templates/member.html change all occurrences of 2012-12-31 to 2036-12-31
6. using PHPMyAdmin run the following SQL script:
   
   Code:

   update amember_payments set expire_date = '2036-12-31' where expire_date = '2012-12-31'

   Note: If you have users that would naturally have expired on 12-31-2012 then you may need to manually adjust them to expire.
7. In some cases you may find that it is necessary to run the RebuildDB to ensure your 3rd party scripts are in sync with the updates.
8. Lastly, be sure to clear browser/cache/cookies and restart when testing to ensure you are not testing using stale session data.

If anyone is still having issues please let me know and I'll do whatever I can to assist you.

I'm not sure much more can be done by aMember staff on this issue. The sites can be manually patched and updated, as indicated, or admins can upgrade their sites to newer versions of the aMember codebase that have this issue resolved.

As I mentioned previously, if there are admins that are having trouble executing the steps let me know and I will do what I can to assist.

While the forum is very helpful for getting questions answered, it does not replace the support system which can be found here:

http://www.amember.com/support/contact

Hi everyone,
First of all I want to apologize for this issue, and want to say thanks to skippybosco who developed instructions for the fix.
This post have everything which is required to fix that issue: http://www.amember.com/forum/thread...subscriptions-expired.16032/page-4#post-61848
Also as was mentioned earlier, this issue was fixed for paypal payments many months ago, and latest v3 doesn't have it.
If you have any problems implementing fix, please send ticket to helpdesk with "URGENT" in subject. I will cover this for you.

To play devil's advocate here, most software companies have end of life support for older/outdated versions of their code. This issue was resolved by aMember in 2010. Only sites that are running older/outdated versions were impacted by this issue.

As far as I'm aware aMember does not "call home" and report back the version of aMember running on any given site (client checks but does not report back) so the notion of "proactively contacting all 3.1.x hosts" is not necessarily feasible.

Could there have been a system wide alert/notice, certainly. Would it have prevented some being "caught off guard", probably not since if their environments are this out of date many are also not monitoring the changelogs/alerts/forums, etc. As I'll discuss a bit further down in my reply, there were numerous discussions of this issue in these forums (and how to fix it) dating back to 2010.

I responded and identified a preliminary fix for the issue within 6 hours of it first being posted in the forum. I further followed up with a full step by step instruction on how to resolve the issue and publicly offered and assisted multiple admins in private who were unable to follow the steps themselves due to lack of technical know how. (note: it took, on average, less than 5 minutes per site to correct)

Incidentally the fix I provided was from a referral to two existing threads in the forum that explained the issue and how to fix it that were posted in January 2012 and February 2012 that I found by searching for '2012-12-31', but in that same search result there are other posts that date back to 2010 that specifically call out the issue.

Now the elephant in the room that I think everyone SHOULD be more concerned with, and aMember has hopefully corrected in v4, is the notion of any kind of a time bomb like this that relies on a specific far future time which can eventually lead to problems.

That being said, I've set up an appointment in my calendar to send me an reminder on December 01, 2036 so that I can post an announcement here in the forum for any admins still running a patched version of aMember 3.1.x and the steps required to patch it to run till 2060. ;-)

In all seriousness, as I don't mean to make light of the situation, believe me I know it does suck to have downtime and having customers negatively impacted. I also want to try and curtail some of the sensationalism that tends to brew around situations since it was a known issue for some time with a known fix (both in updated code, and steps to fix).

Hmm... I've not seen this behavior.

Out of curiosity have you run a RebuildDB? Also, did you update the amember/templates/member.html file? What version of aMember are you running?

What payment provider did they use to make the payment? Did you adjust that payment file to reflect the new far future date (ie. paypal_r.inc.php, clickbank.inc.php, etc)

Have you upgraded paypal plugin to latest version as well?
From what I read it looks like plugin itself was upgraded. In latest v3 it doesn't set subscription's expire date to "RECURRING" but it calculate correct expiration date(for example 1 month for monthly subscripion)

hunteridge, you have to run Rebuild DB. this will fix user's status issues for sure.

Yes plugin from 3.1.9 should work exactly as you explained in your message:

That is extected and there is nothing wrong.