Logs for signup process

So I turned on S2Member yesterday and had a number of users attempt to sign up and pay.

Instantly ran into problems and now trying to piece things back together. I had turned on logging as recommended and while I can see these logs, clearly there is information missing and I’m not sure where to look.

I see:
– aweber-api.log
– paypal-ipn.log
– paypal-rtn.log

Looking through the paypal logs, I only see one of the attempts to join. The payment processed for her, but she either did not notice the redirect or the registration email or did not click it, which is fine–may or may not be an issue.

My real issue is that people were getting “The invoice has already been paid” and “User registration is not currently allowed” messages.

And I *don’t* see where the activity for these users was being logged anywhere. Is it not logged under s2member logs?

I know from searching these forums today that “The invoice has already been paid” may be related to the transient() functions in WordPress and how certain caching schemes affect their behavior. But I feel like I need to be able see what really happened to figure this out or not. (I’m hosting on WPEngine, and they do all the caching behind the scenes so I don’t actually control the caching anyway. They will work with me to check it but I need something to go on.)

Thanks!

Hi Chris,

Please download this Server Check Tool, upload the PHP file to your WordPress directory, and then load the URL to the file in your browser. It will run a bunch of tests to determine if there’s anything amiss on the server-side.

If the s2Member logs don’t show anything about those other transactions, then that would indicate nothing happened with them (i.e., they were never even transferred to the payment gateway).

Another possible cause for the “The invoice has already been paid” message is being already logged into the site when you’re trying to signup and pay as a new user. As you already read elsewhere, server-side caching can also cause issues (if the server caches a previous signup request and s2Member thinks a new signup request is coming from someone who already signed up, that new person might get the “invoice has already been paid” message).

Besides running the server check tool mentioned above, you might want to contact WPEngine support and see if they have any information on compatibility with s2Member. I know several other s2Member customers have discovered that WPEngine needed to tweak some settings on their end for things to work smoothly (a quick search on s2Member.com for “WPEngine” turns up a couple threads, but none directly related to the problem you’re having).

The server check script is a great idea. I ran it and it found that PHPMailer throws an exception: possible email delivery failure, and in fact, the email did not arrive, so that is definitely a problem although obviously it isn’t related to “Invoice has already been paid” or “User registration is not currently allowed” messages.

The only other issue was a notice that the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT was only 32M instead of the 64M.

So I asked WPEngine to help me correct these two, and also to turn off caching on the signup page. I think disabling the caching may help the real issues here, but we’ll see.

No users have accounts at this point on the site, so the already-logged-in scenario doesn’t exist, so we can safely rule problems related to that out of the picture.

Is there a way (outside of s2member) you know of with WordPress to “follow” a user’s path through the site so I can see that they arrive at the signup page, click to go to PayPal and then, sometime later perhaps, show back up on the registration page, proceed to login, etc.? Is there a plugin that will do this or would I have to set up Google Analytics or CrazyEgg or something to do this?

Thanks!

I haven’t personally used any plugins for tracking activity, but I know they exist. You might want to try one of those or use Google Analytics and/or CrazyEgg.