PMPro Update 2.8.3

There are a few ways to see if you were affected by this bug.

1. Spot-check a few subscriptions in your PayPal account. Look for a section titled “Trial period 1”.
2. Check your IPN logs for the value period_type=Trial.
3. Search your new payment profile emails from PayPal for the phrase “Trial Period”.

If you don’t find any subscriptions or messages like this, you weren’t affected by the bug and do not need to worry about a thing.

If you’ve determined that you do have some subscriptions with an unintended one year trial, there are three ways to locate affected subscriptions:

1. Manually go through every active subscription in PayPal.

1. Log in to your PayPal account then navigate to “Pay and Get Paid” > “Subscriptions”
2. In the left column, select “Subscriptions” (not “Subscription Plans”).
3. Click the “Subscription ID” to view the details about this payment plan.
4. If the subscription has the bug, you will see a section titled ‘Trial period 1’

2. Locate the subscriptions in your email or IPN log.

If you are logging IPN, search your logs, email log, or email directly for IPN messages with the following values:

• txn_type=recurring_payment_profile_created
• period_type=Trial

Or, search your email for PayPal’s “You have a new automatic payment profile…” messages. If the subscription has an unintended 1 year trial, you will see a section in the email titled “Trial Period” with a “Trial period amount:” of “0.00”.

If you find subscriptions that were affected by this bug, follow the instructions below to fix affected orders. From the Subscription Info page in PayPal:

1. In the Pricing section, click “Update”.
2. In the “Trial period” section, set the price of the trial to match the regular subscription payment amount. For example, if the subscription is $247 every 1 year, adjust the trial to be $247.
3. Click “Save Updates”.

There are no other changes needed in the membership site side. Repeat this process for every affected subscription.

Subscriptions already in the trial period cannot be updated. For these subscriptions, we recommend you set some ground rules for how you want to fix these members. They still have an active subscription. And depending on how long this issue has been intermittently happening in your site, one member may be closer to paying you again than they are to having missed a payment.

Option 1: Cancel them all immediately

• Some percentage of users will renew manually. Send them an email. Explain what happened. Give them a link to set up a new recurring payment for your membership.
• Locate the user by searching for their subscription ID in the Memberships > Orders page in the WordPress admin.
• Edit the user.
• In the “Membership Level” section, select “None” or some other downgraded free level, check the box to cancel the subscription at the gateway. Save Changes.

Option 2: Cancel people who haven’t paid in the last 6 months, keep the members that will pay you again in 6 months.

This is an arbitrary decision—do what you think is right. You can set a rule that if they are closer to paying again than having missed a payment, just let it ride.

Option 3: Send them a past due invoice and recreate it manually.

You could send the people that missed a payment your PayPal.me link and tell them to make the missed payment directly. This outreach has a few benefits: 

• The people that actually don’t want your membership anymore can tell you this and you can cancel them without the FOMO that they were really gonna stick around. You’d probably have been refunding their renewal anyway. Cancel their membership immediately (while also canceling their subscription).
• The people that do want your membership will give you that missed revenue. Cha-ching. Wait for the payment, manually add the order for this missed payment under Memberships > Orders > Add New Order. Their next recurring payment will process automatically as intended without interruption.