Esinem

I have been having nightmares for several months with data being dropped between Zombaio and CodingFuture's YourMembers plugin, which their tech support seem unable to resolve so far. It appears the membership plan data is not being posted back (missing data from Extra field) so members default to Guest instead of Paying Member.

I'm told this is a generic problem relating to most WordPress membership plugins and the solution ultimately lies with Zombaio.

Are other WordPress membership plugin users, including YourMembers, or those using WP-based membership software, e.g. PornCMS, aware of such a problem? If so, how has it been addressed? I'm tearing my hair out waiting for a solution...

nixem

If you just use WP-Zombaio Plugin there is no need for YourMembers.

Barry (The guy who developed WP-Zombaio) actually works dev for YourMembers...

This plugin enables you to add your site info from ZOA and it creates new users ( As Subscribers) WITHOUT needing to check off "Anyone Can Register"

Currently WP-Zombaio allows you to choose one open page and the rest is behind a members wall. You can use this page as a landing page and allow both join and login on this page as well as some teasers etc.

In the future Barry plans to add the ability to Lock and Unlock specific directories but in the current build you can only Unlock one page and the rest is locked.

It works great though. The Zombaio form simply creates a user and allows you to specify that if the user cancels with Zombaio wether to Delete the User or just Block it until they reactivate(Pay)

WP-Zombaio
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-zombaio/
Barry's Blog on WP-Zombaio
http://barrycarlyon.co.uk/wordpress/...ns/wp-zombaio/

Esinem

Thanks. I was aware of Barry's plugin but Dave (ex-YM) looked at the way I'm set up and it wouldn't help for some reason. I've gone with PornCMS and will be transferring members over to that as I'm increasingly drawn to a one-stop solution

nixem

It would have been less work to get WP-Z working then starting over with PornCMS. Let me know if you need any help though

hellboy78

Hi Esinem

wait for my news, I think I can solve it soon

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bothead

I had that problem of members not updating for a few months.. it ultimately was something zombaio fixed on their end, But not sure what it was.. but when a member renewed.. it didn't update so the user lost access to the site.

hellboy78

if you have YM plugin... yes, the problem is YM plugin, not zombaio,

sometime membership is renewed, sometime not,

I have a programmer that is fixing this bug for me, because YM creator stopped to give support.

I will update you when I finish

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Esinem

I have had 3 YM/Zombaio failures in the last 24hr. It seems that YM doesn't always know when members have paid. I believe it's waiting for a membership type descriptor to be sent back from Zombaio but sometimes it's missing so YM sets the member up as guest. It beats me why YM doesn't just remember the membership type from the join process? Why get it to tell Zombaio and then wait for Zombaio to repeat it, which is what I think it's doing? Maybe that's not how it works?

Another major pain in the butt, is that if a (free?) member expires and then tries to reactivate his account, he get's told "email in use". Surely it should be really easy to reactivate a dormant membership?

hellboy78

Hi
my programmer is working on it

I installed also ccbill, and I'm having similar problems, so...it's definally YM bug

---

when I finish to fix this YM, I will implement NATS into YM, so we can use it with NATS and change payment processor when we want.

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Esinem

I already have PornCMS installed so it's no longer a major issue for me. Too many issues battling with WP and all the plug ins. In addition to YM, page loads were getting slow due to all the code and I had the dilemma of getting it optimised and then having to redo it every time a plug in was upgraded or stay with outdated plugins

hellboy78

for me porncms has too limits

my site is on a dedicated server,

if you don't want to upgrade your wordpress, you can place some cloud protections.

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Esinem

6 months later and still no fix from YourMembers. They don't even respond to support queries. They took down their support forum months ago alleging hacking attacks and its still down. Either they are so incompetent they can't even fix that or they are afraid of all the negative comments! Either way, it stinks!

Their choice of a stuffed monkey as a mascot seems highly appropriate :-D

Esinem

It's official, CodingFutures have dumped support for Zombaio. CCBill is on the way out too. Reassuring, eh? I guess that's one way to solve problems! I wonder which one they will dump next and leave all their users in the lurch?

As far as I can tell, YM Zombaio doesn't offer much more than Zombaio's own basic method which protects a simple members area directory. Not sure I even see the point of it. I believe YM Zombaio was written by Barry, an ex-employee, so not sure who supports it.

Discontinuing support for Zombaio
Written by Tim
on Wednesday, June 26th, 2013 at 1:18 pm.

It?s always sad to remove things from Your Members but we are removing support for Zombaio and CCBill both payment gateways require additional steps to work correctly. Both are designed to be used with their own membership software and the way we use them are becoming less and less supported. Other the last few months we have had an increasing number of issues with Zombaio, and while many customers are happily running Zombaio based YM sites more and more we are finding strange random users not having their payment purchased. As such and with little assistance coming from Zombaio we will be removing support as of YM12.2 release.

For those currently using Zombaio the gateway will continue to work with YM12.2 but will not be officially supported beyond YM13, we will be looking at launching Epoch with YM12.2 and continue to support CCBill in the next release and will encourage people to migrate to an alternate payment system. We will continue to work to support the existing gateway until the launch of YM13.

If you are unable to migrate from Zombaio, we suggest taking a look at wp-zombaio written by a former developer on Your Members it is a WordPress implementation of the existing, obviously its not a fully featured membership system but does provide.

tnash

For those following this thread, the official announcement from June can be found blog.yourmembers.co.uk/2013/discontinuing-support-for-zombaio

Contrary to some of the rather weird statements being placed in our mouths around twitter, we are not saying Zombaio can't be used with WordPress. Indeed we encourage people who plan on just using Zombaio to look at wp-zombaio which is not affiliated with us, but is developed by an ex-employee, it is also free and fully GPL and hosted on wordpress.org.

It's important to understand that, the way Your Members was trying to use Zombaio as a pure payment processor is not how Zombaio is meant to be used. To get the maximum benefit of Zombaio you are best of using their member management system, this is what wp-zombaio does it's a WordPress replacement for the Zombaio scripts that Zombaio provide.

Esinem

No, Tim, you are simply confirming you can't be bothered to support Zombaio or CCBill any more because it will "require additional steps to work correctly". That's very reassuring! Sorry to burst your bubble but the nature of software is you need to maintain it. It's also a good idea to look after your users.

Given you haven't been able to fix your support forum after it went down in May, it doesn't give us a lot of faith in your company's technical abilities, does it? The uncharitable might think you decided to take it off line due to the number of unhappy users ;-) In fact, it seems the ability to post to your Facebook page is disabled. Too much negative feedback?

hellboy78

Hello Tim

nice to see you here.....after 100 emails sent to you...

I can post them here all if you like

you treated me as an idiot....."read the new postback setting for zombaio"
you email me that in june........but it wasnt' working at all...

and now....I moved to ccbill........and nobody into YM is helping me.....no emails, no support....

oh yeah, you suspended my support because I sent you too much emails....I remember that....

nobody in your office for a week, payments locked into my site....
I contacted you in all possible ways........so you removed the support....
very professional.

I talked to your ex-workers.........it's better if I don't write anything here about that.

so, now....write me and tell me definally if you removed my support forever without appeal (I have premium license)

thanks

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hellboy78

YM problem solved

basically, new ccbill file was a total fake,
I think also the zombaio file

so, my theory is....
Tim doesn't want to sell his plugin to adult industry....
so he created new YM updates with fake files.....about ccbill and zombaio

so...they both stopped to work....
he says the problem is related to ccbill and zombaio
and he doesn't refund old customers.......

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Esinem

What do you mean fake file?

hellboy78

the old ccbill file was using "postback"

the new ccbill file was using "webhooks",....totally broken.....nothing into that file was working.....a total fake....

I asked also at old YM programmer, Barry, to look inside.....he didn't see anything wrong,
I really think something wrong into their heads......

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Esinem

I seem to recall somebody mentioning webhooks in relation to Zombaio. It seems to be Javascript related but it's all Greek to me.

These extracts from my ticket at Zombaio might help:

Me:

"I note that from 18/1/2013, there started to be random missing entries in the Extra field in the TID log. Consequently, subscriptions were not being activated automatically in these cases and I am trying to diagnose the cause. I am not getting much help from technical at Your Members so any light you can shed would be most helpful.

How does Zombaio get the data for Extra? Is it fed from my membership system? If so, is there a report that I can check showing the incoming instructions from Your Members received at your end? If Zombaio, generates the data in Extra, why would it drop data randomly? I can see no pattern."

Zombaio asked how data got posted:

"CodingFutures who wrote YourMembers answered your questing thus:

"Hi Bruce,
The info that the tier 1 level support gent asked for makes no sense, but to answer the question:
The form data, is pre-generated using a custom built Payment class which is extended from the core payment class, all the details are passed to the code, including a unique tracking code. This code is generated at the same time as the price and other data it is always present. When the support technician looked at the code he believed the last page of the flow, which indicates the package details to be the Zombaio payment code. The code actually was on the next page and is the post request refresh, if a user has javascript disabled the data is posted via a form button submit instead.

As we have explained the issue is not what's being sent that is correct it's what is not coming back, and has been raised with Zombaio development team. This is only happening in a handful of cases indeed until recently you were the only one we could actually see if happening on. We do now have a second user who has had a user with the same problem. We have also thought a couple of other users had the same issue, but in their cases it was down to their web hooks not set up at all.

If we continue to get no where, then we will have to look at dropping support for Zombaio, this is something we are not keen to do as most of out niche customers are currently using it. We have had several requests for several other adult gateways and we are looking to provide Epoch support in upcoming release.

Regards
Tim"

The last news I had from Zombaio was:

"I made some more tests and when I tested with Javascript enabled the data wasn't posted to the payment form but when testing with it disabled it was posted as expected.

You can test the data posted to the payment form by viewing the source code on the payment form, the first rows in the source code shows the data that was sent for debug purposes.

The data will always be returned in the postback/TID when posted to the payment form but if it's missing when the cardholder has been redirected it will not be available in the postback or TID.

I will ask our tech department to investigate further and get back to you as soon as I have more information from tech."

hellboy78

problem solved with my programmer into 3 months

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hellboy78

I received email from YourMembers

they are out of biz from today !!!

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Esinem

Yes, I did mention rats leaving a sinking ship some while back. Here's the mail for anyone who cares:

We just wanted to let everyone know what?s going on and why we went dark for the last month.

The Your Members project was started in 2008 with the simple goal of making membership sites, it wasn?t even meant to be sold just for our own use. Over time it grew to be one of the most successful early premium plugins within the WordPress eco-system. With our success our staff grew and we got more and more ambitious in ideas and plans. Feature after Feature was added and the codebase grew along with our customer base. During early 2010 we started talking about Your Members version 2 it was going to be a complete rewrite, we decided to take a far more modular approach. YMv2 was never built. Instead we added more features and refined the original codebase, the codebase in YM12 is still based on that original codebase and it is desperately in need of a rewrite.

We started work on YM13 early this year and it became clear the new version wasn?t going to work with our current codebase. Indeed it reached the stage where even little changes are causing massive issues. So in August it was decided that we needed to make YM13 the last release on the current codebase and start on YMv2. I was rereading the blog posts that are sitting in drafts explaining where we were going and why, we never published them.

It became clear it was just not financially feasible to build YMv2 we estimated it was 6 to 9 months work to do what we wanted to do properly and to do it we need to do it properly. We also believe we can?t continue to support and update the existing codebase.

We have therefore been looking for someone to take over Your Members, initially we looked to sell it and then we looked for someone to take on the project from a community point of view. We did have several offers but in each case we felt that they would not provide the community with genuine support and were either just after your email addresses or simply did not understand how much of a task this was.

So it?s with great sadness we are withdrawing Your Members from sale with immediate effect.

What does this mean?
As per our end user license, the moment we withdrew YM from sale a sunset clause is invoked, making everything in the YM download released as GPL. Until now we have had two licenses. One covering the php code which was the GPL and our own license which covered all other assets, now those assets are also covered on GPL.

We are also releasing a final version YM12.0.8 which removes all the licensing and authentication code, it should be available to download from your site in the next 24 hours.

We are placing the plugin on a new home on Github along with all the documentation and videos including premium support videos and documentation. This will also include the new administration manual which was due to be released last month. This information will be based at https://github.com/YourMembers/ we will be updating it throughout the next few weeks.


What should you do now?
This depends, YM12.0.4 is very stable and works well on YM3.5.2 but sadly will not work with WordPress3.6 due to a change in jQueryUI used by WordPress. For the near future we recommend you use this combination.

YM12.0.6 works with WordPress 3.6 but the way we fixed it has resulted in a couple of minor user interface bugs, nothing too serious but something to be aware of.

Longer term we are looking at which membership software is best fit for our existing customers and will be offering advice on migration. If you are looking to migrate now then we suggest s2Pro as the closest feature for feature system.

What will we do?
Coding Futures is ending, we had a good run and we are deeply upset that its had to end this way. We are still looking at the best way forward to support existing YM customers and continue the project but at this stage we consider it a long shot. We have discussed ideas such as Kickstarter and similar but ultimately we don?t see this working but are open to suggestions.

It?s the end of an era for us and we want to thank everyone for their support, the next few weeks are going to be hard as we continue to look to find a way to support the YM and wider WordPress community but also look beyond YM to the future.

Tim
On behalf of the YM team