PayPal Payments Not Being Recorded in OJS

[zfelice]

I have scoured the forums and found these useful threads on this issue, so apologies for reviving something that may have been solved off board.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8085

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8495

I have followed all of the suggestions and instructions in both of these threads. I am not receiving error e-mails. In the database, all of my payments show up as "queued payments" and my notification url is correct for PayPal's IPN. However, in sandbox and the "real" world, my payments do not register in OJS, such that an author could submit a manuscript, pay the submission fee, and still have an "awaiting payment" link. That is, while there are records of the payment in PayPal, no records show up in payment records for OJS. Further, after payment, I have to click a link to return to where I was in order for the payment confirmation page to come up and to be redirected to confirm the submission (where I am again asked for payment though I have just completed one).

Is there a workaround for this? Something I'm doing wrong that I'm overlooking?

Thanks.

[asmecher]

Hi zfelice,

Look in your web server log for PayPal's IPN requests; these will be attempts by PayPal to contact the OJS installation directly to confirm the payment, immediately after the payment is complete (i.e. generally slightly before the user clicks "return to OJS"). If you're not showing any IPN requests in the log, a few things to check:

• Are you running OJS on a non-standard port (other than 80)? PayPal apparently has trouble with this.
• Are you using HTTPS? I'm not sure how PayPal reacts to e.g. self-signed certificates.
• Are you running on an internal IP address or hostname (127.0.0.1 or localhost or behind a firewall)? The IPN URL must be externally accesible.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[zfelice]

Hi Alec,

Thanks so much for your response. I talked with the tech folks on whose server OJS is being hosted. Here was their response:

After the indepth investigation no error could be traced within the system web-service logs that could provide a clue of why the issue is experienced.

As per the questions asked by OJS:

1) OJS on your system is being accessed on standard port 80

2) SSL is not used on submission process

3) There is no firewall being used and the IP the website/domain is using is:

173.236.116.125

The URL that is being used for the IPN to be accessed is:

http://raceandsociety.org/index.php/jou ... Paypal/ipn

At this point I was unable to trace the cause for the described issue.

Any thoughts on this, or any next-level troubleshooting steps I should take? I saw some things in the forum about CURL, but I don't think that's an issue with my installation.

Thanks for your help.

best,

zandria

[asmecher]

Hi Zandria,

Were you able to find the IPN requests from PayPal showing up in your server's access log? That's the best place to start debugging.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[zfelice]

Hi Alec,

Sooo, I *think* I found the relevant things in my access logs (I searched for everything with 'paypal' or 'ipn' in it), but I'm not sure how to interpret them.

In the error logs, I found these:

[Wed Feb 06 01:56:14 2013] [error] [client 87.119.100.150] File does not exist: /home/raceands/public_html/404.shtml, referer: http://raceandsociety.org/plugins/paymethod/paypal/ipn

[Wed Feb 06 01:56:14 2013] [error] [client 87.119.100.150] File does not exist: /home/raceands/public_html/plugins/paymethod/paypal/ipn, referer: http://raceandsociety.org/plugins/paymethod/paypal/ipn

[Wed Feb 06 01:56:14 2013] [error] [client 87.119.100.150] File does not exist: /home/raceands/public_html/plugins/paymethod/paypal/ipn

In the raw access logs, I found these:

67.195.112.32 - - [09/Feb/2013:12:00:43 -0600] "GET /index.php/journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"

67.195.112.32 - - [09/Feb/2013:12:01:03 -0600] "GET /index.php/journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"

I have tried to make payments a dozen times, but this is all I found in the logs. Are there other keywords for which I should search?

Thanks again for your help.

[asmecher]

Hi Zandria,

You're on the right track with the raw access logs. Those two requests aren't from PayPal but the PayPal requests should look similar (i.e. should contain "ipn" in the log entry). Are there any more?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[zfelice]

Hi Alec,

Nope. That was it in terms of the logs up until that point. So, I attempted several more payments just now (still using Sandbox) and here is what I came up with in the logs. Apologies for the lines and lines of text:

173.0.82.126 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:12:01 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:12:16 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/author/submit/5?articleId=13 HTTP/1.1" 200 10347 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:12:21 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/author/saveSubmit/5 HTTP/1.1" 200 10207 "http://raceandsociety.org/index.php/journal/author/submit/5?articleId=13" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
173.0.82.126 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:12:57 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:13:03 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/author/submit/5?articleId=13 HTTP/1.1" 200 10347 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:13:08 -0600] "GET /index.php/journal/author/paySubmissionFee/13 HTTP/1.1" 200 10851 "http://raceandsociety.org/index.php/journal/author/submit/5?articleId=13" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
173.0.82.126 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:13:41 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:14:03 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/author/submit/5?articleId=13 HTTP/1.1" 200 10347 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:14:07 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/author/saveSubmit/5 HTTP/1.1" 200 10207 "http://raceandsociety.org/index.php/journal/author/submit/5?articleId=13" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
173.0.82.126 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:14:36 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:14:44 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/author/submit/5?articleId=13 HTTP/1.1" 200 10347 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:14:46 -0600] "GET /index.php/journal/author/paySubmissionFee/13 HTTP/1.1" 200 10851 "http://raceandsociety.org/index.php/journal/author/submit/5?articleId=13" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
173.0.82.126 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:15:17 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:15:32 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/author/submit/5?articleId=13 HTTP/1.1" 200 10347 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:15:37 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/author/saveSubmit/5 HTTP/1.1" 200 10207 "http://raceandsociety.org/index.php/journal/author/submit/5?articleId=13" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:15:46 -0600] "GET /index.php/journal/index HTTP/1.1" 200 8037 "http://raceandsociety.org/index.php/journal/author/saveSubmit/5" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:15:50 -0600] "GET /index.php/journal/user HTTP/1.1" 200 8681 "http://raceandsociety.org/index.php/journal/index" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:15:54 -0600] "GET /index.php/journal/author HTTP/1.1" 200 17599 "http://raceandsociety.org/index.php/journal/user" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
141.225.243.216 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:16:11 -0600] "GET /index.php/journal/author/paySubmissionFee/3 HTTP/1.1" 200 10825 "http://raceandsociety.org/index.php/journal/author" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17"
173.0.82.126 - - [12/Feb/2013:14:16:42 -0600] "POST /index.php/journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-"

So, I see the references to "articleID 13," which is the article I was attempting to submit. However, each time, I was re-directed to the payment screen when I returned to the site.

Thank you so much again for your time and patience. I am a novice at best.

best,

z

[asmecher]

Hi Zandria,

The entries from the "173.0.82.126" IP address are PayPal trying to contact OJS, so we know that we're getting at least this far. I suspect there's a problem when OJS tries to accept those connections. Can you check your web server's error log (wherever PHP errors get sent, which will depend on your system's configuration) for entries corresponding to those times? Is OJS generally delivering email without problems? Often if there's a payment processing problem, an email should be sent to the journal's primary or technical contact with details.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[zfelice]

Ah, I see.

For today, there are two errors:

[Tue Feb 12 13:48:36 2013] [error] [client 72.30.161.241] File does not exist: /home/raceands/public_html/404.shtml
[Tue Feb 12 13:48:36 2013] [error] [client 72.30.161.241] File does not exist: /home/raceands/public_html/plugins/paymethod/paypal/ipn

I've checked the appropriate address (I should have done this before, but I have so many test addresses, I couldn't remember which one was the appropriate one), and I have several "Unusual Pay Activity" e-mails, although I don't have any for today's attempts. Here is the message on such an e-mail:

Open Journal Systems has encountered unusual activity relating to PayPal
payment support for the journal Issues in Race & Society: An
Interdisciplinary Global Journal. This activity may need further
investigation or manual intervention.

This email was generated by Open Journal Systems' PayPal plugin.

Full post information for the request:
Array
(
)


Additional information (if supplied):
Confirmation return:
CURL error: Protocol https not supported or disabled in libcurl

Server vars:
Array
(
[DOCUMENT_ROOT] => /home/raceands/public_html
[GATEWAY_INTERFACE] => CGI/1.1
[HTTP_ACCEPT] =>
text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
[HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING] => gzip, deflate
[HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE] => en-US,en;q=0.5
[HTTP_CONNECTION] => keep-alive
[HTTP_COOKIE] => OJSSID=363b3c52a3eb49413810fba24d339b4f
[HTTP_HOST] => raceandsociety.org
[HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0)
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0
[PATH] => /bin:/usr/bin
[PATH_INFO] => /journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn
[PATH_TRANSLATED] => /home/raceands/public_html/index.php
[QUERY_STRING] =>
[REDIRECT_STATUS] => 200
[REMOTE_ADDR] => 46.35.174.151
[REMOTE_PORT] => 55767
[REQUEST_METHOD] => GET
[REQUEST_URI] => /index.php/journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn
[SCRIPT_FILENAME] => /home/raceands/public_html/index.php
[SCRIPT_NAME] => /index.php
[SERVER_ADDR] => 173.236.116.125
[SERVER_ADMIN] => webmaster@raceandsociety.org
[SERVER_NAME] => raceandsociety.org
[SERVER_PORT] => 80
[SERVER_PROTOCOL] => HTTP/1.1
[SERVER_SIGNATURE] =>
[SERVER_SOFTWARE] => Apache
[UNIQUE_ID] => URR7eK3sdH0AACWMX6MAAAAH
[PHP_SELF] => /index.php/journal/payment/plugin/Paypal/ipn
[REQUEST_TIME] => 1360296825
[argv] => Array
(
)

[argc] => 0
)

I checked the error logs for the corresponding day (2/7), but came up with nothing that seems to be related to PayPal:

[Thu Feb 07 03:07:49 2013] [error] [client 87.119.100.150] File does not exist: /home/raceands/public_html/404.shtml
[Thu Feb 07 03:07:49 2013] [error] [client 87.119.100.150] File does not exist: /home/raceands/public_html/admin

However, there are other seemingly related errors, like these:

[Wed Feb 06 01:56:14 2013] [error] [client 87.119.100.150] File does not exist: /home/raceands/public_html/404.shtml, referer: http://raceandsociety.org/plugins/paymethod/paypal/ipn
[Wed Feb 06 01:56:14 2013] [error] [client 87.119.100.150] File does not exist: /home/raceands/public_html/plugins/paymethod/paypal/ipn, referer: http://raceandsociety.org/plugins/paymethod/paypal/ipn
[Wed Feb 06 01:56:14 2013] [error] [client 87.119.100.150] File does not exist: /home/raceands/public_html/plugins/paymethod/paypal/ipn

but they don't correspond with the dates and times I received the "unusual pay activity" messages.

I've seen in other places in the forum and on other sites the "CURL error" issue. Am I getting warmer?

Thanks again.

best,

z

[asmecher]

Hi Zandria,

Yes, that's helpful. The key part is:

CURL error: Protocol https not supported or disabled in libcurl

This indicates that the CURL library (which OJS uses to communicate with PayPal) doesn't have HTTPS support built into it. You'll need to talk to your hosting provider about having that enabled.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[zfelice]

Hi Alec,

Thanks again so much. My hosting provider has enabled CURL, but thus far in tests, I'm not seeing any changes. I don't have any PayPal related errors in the error logs yet, nor do I have any unusual payment activity e-mails in the right spots. I'm going to keep testing, checking the error logs, checking the e-mails, and perhaps ask my provider to restart the server (if they didn't when they enabled CURL).

Thanks so much!

best,

z

[zfelice]

Hi Alec,

Alas, I think I'm still where I was when I last posted. Here is the latest from my hosting support personnel:

Hello,

We have reviewed this and your previous tickets and the issue has been already investigated but unfortunately we do not have a solution for it. Note that the SSL and the curlssl support are set on your server already. The SSL validation you may check here:

http://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.h ... ociety.org

and the CurlSSL support is listed on the phpinfo page which you may review via the following URL:

https://raceandsociety.org/i.php

cURL support enabled
--------------
cURL Information libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8b zlib/1.2.3 libidn/0.6.5
--------------

Note that there is no option to install a paypal SSL on the Apache of your server as this will disable your current domain SSL certificate. Additionally note that the IPN has API authentication which does not require the paypal ca certification and uses userlevel auth via https. Please check the script again with the developers of the same and if they require any details about the server configuration provide us with the list and we will collect the data for you.

Should you have any further questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact us.

Any other troubleshooting I might do before I enlist the help of PKP personnel? Thanks so much for your help.

best,

z

[asmecher]

Hi Zandria,

Hmm... Can you confirm whether you're still seeing emails containing the error message?

CURL error: Protocol https not supported or disabled in libcurl

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[zfelice]

Hi Alec,

I don't have any CURL errors and no unusual payment activity e-mails.

best,

z

[zfelice]

And as a stop gap, I have switched to the manual payment method, but I'm having the same issue where the author clicks "finish submission" but is rerouted to the payment page in an endless loop. That is, people click to say they've submitted a payment manually and the system (typically) generates an e-mail to let the manager know that confirmation of payment needs to be manually entered into the system. However, because the submission is not finished, and is marked incomplete, the manager cannot see any submissions in the queue. Thus, submissions cannot be manually marked as paid.