Entries Tagged 'Troubleshooting' ↓

If you’re using OptimizePress as your theme, make sure you’re only using membership templates that have the word “DAP..” in them.

DO NOT USE any template that has the words “WP” or “WP Secured“. That will cause members logging in via DAP, to not be able to access those pages.

Those templates are meant for OP’s own internal membership functionality, or built for other membership plugins. Those will not work with DAP.

Templates that are OK to use with DAP

• Members 1 Content (Free/DAP/WL)
• Members 1 DAP Login Page
• Members 1 DAP/Wishlist Error
• Members 1 General Page (Free/DAP/WL)
• Etc.. anything with the word “DAP” in it.

For the other squeeze page/sales page templates, it doesn’t matter which ones you pick.

This restriction applies only to the “Members…” templates.

DAP’s Amazon SES integration has been heavily tested, and we use it ourselves at DigitalAccessPass.com . So you can rest assured that there are no “bugs” of any kind.

Here are some troubleshooting steps if SES integration is not working even after you’ve followed the documentation exactly.

Troubleshooting SES

1. MOST COMMON MISTAKE: Have you whitelisted the DAP “From” email in Amazon? And have you used exact same “case” for the email id in both places (DAP and Amazon)? Double-check spelling and case in both DAP and Amazon – they must be EXACTLY the same. For eg., you@yoursite.com is NOT the same as You@YourSite.com as far as Amazon is concerned. So if you’ve set the “From Email” in DAP to be you@yoursite.com, then you must whitelist exactly the same email id you@yoursite.com within your Amazon SES account as well.
2. Have you requested Amazon for “Production Access” to your SES account? Being in “Sandbox” mode has its disadvantages (you can only send “from” and “to” whitelisted” emails ONLY).
3. Are you using the exact ports as mentioned in our documentation? Ignore the port #s that Amazon recommends.
4. IMPORTANT: Double-check with your web host to make sure that they actually allow a plugin like DAP to connect to a third-party server like Amazon SES to send out emails. Some hosts don’t even allow that to begin with (like BlueHost, for eg.)
5. Turn on the logs by setting DAP > Setup > Config > Log Level to “Log All Activity”.
6. Then go to System > Logs and clear the logs. Then go to one of your test accounts, and edit the user.
7. On the “User Edit” page, click on “Resend Login/Password”.
8. Check the email inbox to see if you got the email. If you didn’t, go to System > Logs and take the entire logs shown there, and paste it into a support ticket, and don’t forget to give us your WP login info and FTP info (and if possible, Amazon login info as well), and we’ll troubleshoot it.

Starting DAP v4.4, all passwords are encrypted. Previously, one of the main reasons that we had made it open, was because of many DAP admins asking for it to be that way so that they could log in “as” one fo their members to see what they’re seeing, for troubleshooting, etc.

But since the passwords are now encrypted, we have provided an alternate way for DAP admin to log in as a regular user/member.

Log In As Member (LIAM)

• If your primary browser is say Firefox where you’re normally logged in as WP admin and DAP admin, then open a separate browser window (like in Chrome or Safari)
• Go to http://YourSite.com/dap/loginAs.php

On that page, you will see 3 form fields as shown in the image below:

1) Email address of user/member that you wish to log in as
2) DAP Admin Email
3) DAP Admin Password

So once DAP verifies that it is indeed the DAP Admin trying to log in as someone else, DAP will log you into the site as that member whose email id you entered in (1) above.

NOTE: The Log In As Member (LIAM) feature does NOT mean that you can use just one browser to log in as both DAP Admin and regular member. You still need to use two separate browsers – one for DAP admin (like Chrome) another for regular member (Firefox). All LIAM does is to give you a workaround for logging in as someone else, because starting 4.4, the DAP Admin can no longer see what the member’s password is in order to log in as them.

This is an OptimizePress issue where the CSS for a protected page causes formatting issues on page.

Problem

You try to visit a protected page that you’re not eligible to view, and see an ugly page full of un-formatted links

Solution

• Create a custom error page in WP – like http://YourSite.com/error/
• When creating the above page, select the OptimizePress template “DAP Error Page”
• In the body of that error page, enter something like this:
  Sorry, you do not have access to this content.
  If you are already a member, click here to login.
  If you are not a member yet, then click here to get access.
• In the above example, link the text “click here to login” to your stand-alone DAP login page (eg., http://YourSite.com/login/). And link the “get access” text to your sales page.
• Then take this error page’s URL – which is http://YourSite.com/error/ – and enter it into the “Error Page URL” field of all DAP Products.
• Also enter this same URL into DAP Admin > Setup > Config > “Error Page URL (Global)”.

Save, and that will no longer display the ugly error page going forward. Instead, it will redirect the user to the above custom error page.

User ID 111 has been created with email id ABC123@somewhere.com

Same user buys a different product using a completely new (Paypal) email id. and DAP creates User ID 999 with PayPal email XYZ789@anothersite.com

User now has 2 accounts and wants only ABC123@somewhere.com (user ID 111) to be active.

So here’s what you should do:

1. Place XYZ789@anothersite.com in the PayPal email field of User ID 111 and save.
2. Give User ID 111 access to all products that User ID 999 currently has active, with matching start and end dates.
3. Delete User ID 999 fully from the system.

If User ID 111 purchases additional products through Paypal, and her primary Paypal email id is still XYZ789@anothersite.com, then that Paypal email id will be recognized by DAP, and all purchased products will be activated under User ID 111 and no additional User IDs will be created.

However, if User ID 111 has changed their primary Paypal email id to be something else like XYZ123@yetanother.com, then the next time they make a purchase, DAP will not know it’s the same person, and will end up creating a completely new user id for the buyer. Which means, you will have to do the merge again, and replace the old Paypal email id in DAP with the new Paypal email id of the buyer.

Using a “cache” plugin for speeding up your site is like putting band-aid on a gaping wound. It’s only a temporary fix, and not a real long-term solution.

Plus a cache plugin has its place, but it’s certainly not for a membership site, where DAP will need to make calls to the database to figure out who’s viewing the content, are they a member, what products have they purchased, what content do they have access to, etc.

If you want to speed up your web site, you must address the core issue, which is — your web site is getting more traffic than your web server (web hosting account) can handle.

So here are a couple of ways in which you can speed up your web site:

• The easiest thing you can do is to revisit all of your plugins that you have enabled and see if you still need all of them. Remember that every single additional plugin running on your site, adds some overhead to (basically, “slows down”) your web site or blog. So use only as few plugins as you absolutely must. With so many cool plugins freely available for WordPress, it is very easy to get carried away, and install tens of plugins, most of them adding very little value, but sometimes causing the most overhead in terms of server resources. So keep only a bare minimum of other plugins (some social plugins are a real pain – making calls to third-party web sites to get their information from).
• Make sure you are always using the latest version of WordPress, or at worst, one version behind the very latest and greatest (you definitely want to be sure first that there are no conflicts with other critical plugins that you’re using on your site, like DAP).
• Make sure you update all of the plugins you’re using to their individual latest versions.
• If you are hosting on a shared (a.k.a “cheap”) web host paying just a few dollars a month for hosting, then your web site is basically competing for server resources (like memory and bandwidth and database access) with possibly tens (or even hundreds) of other web sites on that same server (many may not belong to you, but to others with whom you are sharing the server – and hence the name “shared hosting”).Search for the keywords “digg effect” or “slashdot effect” on Google, and you’ll see how many WordPress sites crash when a link to the site appears among the top results in popular social sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com or Slashdot.com.If your traffic levels have outgrown your server, then the best thing you can do is to upgrade to a bigger server, or get a Virtual Private Server, or even get a dedicated host, depending on your budget. See our recommended web hosts list.

If you’re having weird issues – like members logging in and seeing other people’s profile information, or logging in as a valid user and being told “Sorry, you don’t have access to this content” – then the culprit almost always is some kind of a “cache” plugin.

Do not use cache plugins on your membership site. If you wish to know why, then skip the section below and go to “Why Doesn’t It Work?”

To fix the issue, keep reading…

Solution To Caching Issues

First, let’s address how to fix your issue if you did have a cache plugin – like WP Super Cache – turned on, and are now having a bunch of login issues with logins and users and access and all sorts of things getting mixed up.

1. De-activate the plugin
2. Open your wp-config.php file. If there are lines in there that look like this…
   define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager
   define( ‘WPCACHEHOME’, ‘/home/xyz/public_html/yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/’ ); //Added by WP-Cache ManagerThen comment out both lines, by adding a “//” at the beginning of each line, like this.
   //define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager
   //define( ‘WPCACHEHOME’, ‘/home/xyz/public_html/yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/’ ); //Added by WP-Cache Manager
3. Go to your wp-content/plugins/ folder. See if there’s a folder in there called “cache”. If yes, then rename it to “_cache”.
   

That should do the trick. Now re-test whatever the issue was before, and it would have probably been resolved now.

Why Doesn’t It Work?

Cache plugins are built on the premise that they will “cache” (save and store the contents of) WordPress pages and posts – which usually don’t change for “non-membership” type regular blogs – in a easy to retrieve, static file, so that WordPress doesn’t have to go to the database to load the contents of the page or post each and every time, which will improve the performance and loading time of your WordPress blog in general.

But the fact that such plugins are actually designed to “skip” interactions with the database as much as possible, and will make a “static copy” of your page or post and serve the same static copy to all visitors regardless of who they are, completely goes against the concept of a membership site.

The idea behind using a membership plugin like DAP, it to make sure that different visitors see different content: For ex.,

1) Casual visitors (Non-Members) who have NOT yet signed up for your products, should see content differently than …

2) Members who may have purchased one of your products, but not the product that gives them access to a specific page or post, who should see content differently than…

3) Members who actually have purchased the right product and DO have access to the content, who should see content differently than…

4) Ex-Members who signed up for your subscription-based content in the past, but have since canceled or allowed their access to expire

So, DAP tries to figure out who the visitor is first, and then packages the very same content differently to each category of visitors.

And installing a “cache” plugin kind of makes the whole point of a membership plugin meaningless. Both plugins basically contradict each other in what they’re trying to do.

One (your cache plugin) is trying to speed things up by not going to the database every time, while the other wants to make sure all of the right settings are loaded from the database to make sure your content stays secure from un-authorized access.

So, while cache plugins may work for the average, non-membership, static blog where a single post or page is not really meant to be shown differently to different people, it’s not a good idea to use it on a membership-site.

* When you schedule a broadcast email, it’s added to the job queue with a status of NEW
* When the cron job runs at the top of the hour, then the job status changes to COMPLETE (C) and the emails get sent.

So to test it, do this.

1. set up an email broadcast to a test user using the CSV format (option # 5)
2. Go to DAP Admin > System > Job Queue and see if the job was added with a status of NEW
3. Now manually run the cron by running this cron script in a browser (just for testing)
   http://yoursite.com/dap/dap-cron.php (replace yoursite.com with the name of your site)
4. Then go back to the job queue and see if the status for the email job has changed to ‘C’ (complete)
5. If yes, check if the email was received.

Troubleshooting “Payload Format Incorrect” Error

If you see this error when trying to send out a broadcast to a default group from the Email > Broadcast page, then the most plausible cause for this is that there are some special, non-standard characters in the body of the email that you’re trying to broadcast.

This could happen if you copied text that you composed in a Microsoft Word doc, or you cut/pasted from a WordPress blog post. And both Word and WordPress (some themes) are famous for creating special characters out of normal characters.

Example:

If you take a closer look at the body of your email, especially the single quotes and double-quotes characters, you will find that these may not be the standard single quote and double quote characters that you get from a plain text editor.

And these special characters trip up the DAP email broadcasting system.

So please take a closer look at all of the following characters:

• Single quotes
• Double quotes
• Hyphens
• Special symbols like trademark and copyright

And just type over them again just to be sure with the normal equivalent using your keyboard, and try the broadcast again.

And this time, it should work.

Email Body Showing Up Partially On Job Queue

When you view the broadcast emails that you just scheduled on the System > Job Queue page, if you see that the email body in the saved job has been randomly cut off at one point (usually at the point where there would normally be a single or double quote), then that’s also an indication of non-standard characters in the email that you tried to send out. So see the above example for how to weed out any non-standard single or double quotes or hyphens, and try the test again with just one test email, and see if it goes out to just that one email. Because if it fails for one email, then it will fail for all emails being sent via the DAP Broadcast system.

Problem: You see emails sent to your DAP Admin email account that look like this:

paypalCoupon.php: missing item_name

-or-

paypalCoupon.php: No such Product found – SomeProductNameHere

This could be happening because….

a) Some robot software somewhere is auto-posting to that URL.

b) It’s possible that a search engine spider or spambot is hopping from link to link, submitting the form repeatedly from the backend, and because the form is being submitted in an illegal/invalid fashion, DAP is complaining about a missing coupon code.

So for now, if everything else is working ok, and the annoying email is the the only issue, then you can just ignore those emails. Or better yet, simply put a filter on that email subject and have it directly sent to the trash folder in your email client.

If you or your members are noticing strange characters in emails – especially where there should normally be a single or double quote, then these are due to what are known as “Smart Quotes”.

These special characters always show up when you copy text from a WordPress blog (some themes use these characters) or a Microsoft Word document.

Single quote:

'(correct)

`(incorrect)

Double quote:

" (correct)

`` (incorrect)

The single quote that works correctly is located next to the “Enter” key.

The incorrect one is located next to the “1″ number key.

So copy your email text to a text editor, like notepad. Then change all single quotes to be ‘ and all double-quotes to be “ in your emails. Then put them back into DAP, and then test.

The “strange characters” issue should then be resolved.

NOTE: In a future version, we will implement an enhancement in DAP so that DAP can handle this automatically, but for now, the above solution is your only option.