"This route is not valid" error should not prevent PayPal from working
in progress
I
Israel 365
As a donor, I want to donate using PayPal, but when I get back from PayPal, I get the "This route is not valid" fatal error.
Ben Meredith
Here's the latest on this one, heading into the weekend!
First: the initial issue and cause. In the process of doing some great future-proofing on the GiveWP platform, we are moving some stuff around, including the method by which PayPal Standard donations are marked as complete (the IPN). I won't bore you with the details (developers who are interested can go check out the commits on our GitHub repo for the full nerdy details) but the bottom line is we essentially just moved some stuff around to be better organized, and it ended up breaking that IPN, so that donations were not being marked as "complete" even though they were in fact complete at PayPal.
Worse, donors were being returned to the site after a successful PayPal Standard donation to a page that was blank and just said "FORBIDDEN" which is way cooler in scary movies than it is when a donor is being generous. So site owners didn't even know anything was up until donors told them. We don't like that any more than site owners do.
(not so) Fun fact: it only broke in a way that you could detect with a LIVE, real money donation. That's unfortunate because we test with FAKE money donations, and Fake (sandbox) donations were getting marked as complete juuuuust fine, and no nasty "FORBIDDEN" messages. Sigh.
Next: half of a fix. On Thursday, we shipped a fix for the issue in version 2.19.4, and there was much rejoicing until I, your faithful head of Quality Assurance, tested one last thing, and found that in certain cases the "FORBIDDEN" message was still showing up. Specifically, when the donation is made on a form where guest donations are disabled (so every donor has a WordPress account created for them at the time of donation), or any donation made on PayPal standard by someone who is logged into the site, they still got the "FORBIDDEN" message.
So we set back to fixing it, and got it fixed in version 2.19.5 which just shipped moments ago.
Now Donors are not being greeted with "FORBIDDEN" under any circumstances.
There is one lingering issue to be aware of: if a donor is logged out, and the form does not create an account at the time of donation, there's still an issue that prevents the donation from being marked as "complete" and leaves it instead in "Processing."
We decided to go ahead and ship 2.19.5 today so that donors don't get confused by the FORBIDDEN message, and on Monday (unless something strange happens) we'll patch the final little bit to mark those donations as "complete." In the meantime, you can manually mark donations as complete after verifying from PayPal that they are.
TOO LONG, DIDN'T READ?
We patched all donor facing issues, and the only remaining issue here is that some donations that were complete on PayPal are being marked as "processing" on the GiveWP side. At no point were donations actually not being received, just some confusing statuses and error messages.
Ben Meredith
Here's the latest on this one, heading into the weekend!
First: the initial issue and cause. In the process of doing some great future-proofing on the GiveWP platform, we are moving some stuff around, including the method by which PayPal Standard donations are marked as complete (the IPN). I won't bore you with the details (developers who are interested can go check out the commits on our GitHub repo for the full nerdy details) but the bottom line is we essentially just moved some stuff around to be better organized, and it ended up breaking that IPN, so that donations were not being marked as "complete" even though they were in fact complete at PayPal.
Worse, donors were being returned to the site after a successful PayPal Standard donation to a page that was blank and just said "FORBIDDEN" which is way cooler in scary movies than it is when a donor is being generous. So site owners didn't even know anything was up until donors told them. We don't like that any more than site owners do.
(not so) Fun fact: it only broke in a way that you could detect with a LIVE, real money donation. That's unfortunate because we test with FAKE money donations, and Fake (sandbox) donations were getting marked as complete juuuuust fine, and no nasty "FORBIDDEN" messages. Sigh.
Next: half of a fix. On Thursday, we shipped a fix for the issue in version 2.19.4, and there was much rejoicing until I, your faithful head of Quality Assurance, tested one last thing, and found that in certain cases the "FORBIDDEN" message was still showing up. Specifically, when the donation is made on a form where guest donations are disabled (so every donor has a WordPress account created for them at the time of donation), or any donation made on PayPal standard by someone who is logged into the site, they still got the "FORBIDDEN" message.
So we set back to fixing it, and got it fixed in version 2.19.5 which just shipped moments ago.
Now Donors are not being greeted with "FORBIDDEN" under any circumstances.
There is one lingering issue to be aware of: if a donor is logged out, and the form does not create an account at the time of donation, there's still an issue that prevents the donation from being marked as "complete" and leaves it instead in "Processing."
We decided to go ahead and ship 2.19.5 today so that donors don't get confused by the FORBIDDEN message, and on Monday (unless something strange happens) we'll patch the final little bit to mark those donations as "complete." In the meantime, you can manually mark donations as complete after verifying from PayPal that they are.
TOO LONG, DIDN'T READ?
We patched all donor facing issues, and the only remaining issue here is that some donations that were complete on PayPal are being marked as "processing" on the GiveWP side. At no point were donations actually not being received, just some confusing statuses and error messages.
Matheus Martins
in progress