Paid Subscriptions authentication_failure

[MariahMan]

I'm running a legacy version of Vbulletin (3.8.1 PL4) and for ~15 years my paid subscriptions and PayPall have worked flawlessly...until April 14th this year. All of a sudden, I started getting messages about people purchasing paid subscriptions and their account not be upgraded immediately (and I confirmed they were paying w/ an instant payment) and renewals not processing. I've changed nothing on my site, let alone anything that would have the wildest chance of causing this.

In the vBulletin transaction log, I'm consistently getting transaction failures that look like the attached with the 'vb_error_code' of 'authentication_failure'. I'm not sure where the failure is occurring (if it's my site to PayPal, or PayPal back to my site). In the 'Payment API Test Communication' page, I have a checkmark in the pass column. I've created tickets with PayPal and my host, neither can identify the issue. My host says everything is working fine as far as they can tell and of course PayPal just says I should upgrade from EOL'd forum software, without acknowledging that unless something changed on April 14th, that wouldn't explain it.

I do run my site on a CloudFlare protected domain. I've created a ticket with CloudFlare, but to no avail. I've paused CloudFlare on my site to eliminate that variable, and still the issue persists.

Any thoughts anyone has to help resolve this? I really don't want to go through the complicated upgrade process just because of an issue that seems to be with PayPal (and of course no guarantee an upgrade resolves this). There's not much to this so I'm at a loss. The Payment API manager for PayPal just defines an email address, which is still the same email on the account.

Any help would be super appreciated. Thanks!

[Trevor Hannant]

This is likely down to changes at PayPal's end where they've updated their return messaging. As vBulletin 3 is long end of life, we won't be making any changes to that version to support any changes via PayPal - vBulletin 5 has been updated to use the current IPN process.

[punchbowl]

Same happened to me on the same date. Your recurring subscriptions will still go though but you'll need to manually upgrade the accounts. Easier just to change people to perma vip then demote them when they cancel their subs.

Annoying the emails have no mention of username. I ended up using the table with the errors to link the username with the paypal email.

I replaced the whole system with a PayPal button for new subs but retained all my existing users. Even then there's problems as i sometimes don't get an email confirming a purchase for 24hrs. I won't have new recurring subs for a while. You can install the paypal business app on your phone and you'll get instant notifications.

I feel your pain.

[yetdog111]

Just saw this, but I also ran into this a few months back and had to figure it out.

The old vB 3.8 code calls PayPal via HTTP. You need to edit the includes/paymentapi/class_paypal.php file and update the URL to leverage HTTPS:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://ipnpb.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr'); 

[Pablo Alonso]

I'm running a legacy version of Vbulletin (3.8.1 PL4) and for ~15 years my paid subscriptions and PayPall have worked flawlessly...until April 14th this year. All of a sudden, I started getting messages about people purchasing paid subscriptions and their account not be upgraded immediately (and I confirmed they were paying w/ an instant payment) and renewals not processing. I've changed nothing on my site, let alone anything that would have the wildest chance of causing this.

In the vBulletin transaction log, I'm consistently getting transaction failures that look like the attached with the 'vb_error_code' of 'authentication_failure'. I'm not sure where the failure is occurring (if it's my site to PayPal, or PayPal back to my site). In the 'Payment API Test Communication' page, I have a checkmark in the pass column. I've created tickets with PayPal and my host, neither can identify the issue. My host says everything is working fine as far as they can tell and of course PayPal just says I should upgrade from EOL'd forum software, without acknowledging that unless something changed on April 14th, that wouldn't explain it.

I do run my site on a CloudFlare protected domain. I've created a ticket with CloudFlare, but to no avail. I've paused CloudFlare on my site to eliminate that variable, and still the issue persists.

Any thoughts anyone has to help resolve this? I really don't want to go through the complicated upgrade process just because of an issue that seems to be with PayPal (and of course no guarantee an upgrade resolves this). There's not much to this so I'm at a loss. The Payment API manager for PayPal just defines an email address, which is still the same email on the account.

Any help would be super appreciated. Thanks!

Exactly the same and on the same dates. Did you manage to solve the problem? How?

Best regards

[Trevor Hannant]

Exactly the same and on the same dates. Did you manage to solve the problem? How?

Best regards

Have you tried the post immediately above yours?