Won't fix Issue with paid account upgrades

[Rob]

Hi,

One of my users bought an account upgrade (yearly renewing subscription) which is due to expire in 2015. For some odd reason they bought the same upgrade a month later and xenforo has rightly extended the expiry period to 2016. The user then explained their error and asked for a refund of the latest payment which I processed. The initial payment was not reversed, only the second (most recent) payment.
I expected xenForo to knock the expiry date back down to 2015 but it actually cancelled the entire subscription.

I'm not sure if you'd class this is a bug and I'm not sure if it can be coded around.

Cheers,

Rob

 

[Mike]

This would be the expected behavior as we don't allow upgrades to be purchased multiple times. If we detect they purchased it, it gets moved to the purchased list and there's nothing provided there to purchase it again. As such, the existing behavior is unlikely to be changed.

The question would then be how they managed to purchase it twice. Do you have any add-ons that touch account upgrades?

 

[Rob]

Hi Mike,

It's a recurring subscription. They purchased originally in 2013... it renewed this year, and then they bought it again.
I'm not sure if xenforo preventing multiple purchases is a new thing or not but their latest purchases was on 1.4

The expiry period was doubled, so I assumed xenforo allowed this and handled it.

 

[Mike]

Just to clarify, what sort of time frame are we talking about? Your last message doesn't mention the "a month later" thing. The only way I could see this really happening would be if they ended up buying it again just after their previous one had expired but before PayPal came back to say it was renewed, which presumably shouldn't happen a month apart.

If that was the case (a month delay), it's really a difficult issue and not one that I can see a good way of handling. 1.4 does add a few hours delay to try to shorten the window where someone gets downgraded "erroneously" while a recurring payment was pending.

 

[Rob]

You know what Mike, I really can't fathom this at all. I looked into her account prior to refunding the most recent payment. The subscription had a 2016 expiry so somehow, somewhere along the line xenforo has allowed her to buy this subscription again and had extended her existing subscription by a year. I cant see any other reason for her expiry to be 2016 otherwise as it's only a yearly subscription.

 

[Mike]

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing a clear cut way of handling something like this (a subscription running multiple times and then receiving a cancellation).

I could possible look at subtracting time from the end of the subscription and seeing if it ends up in the past; that might be safe in a lot of cases, though it would fall over with manual adjustments involved. There are also situations where PayPal issues a temporary cancellation why they investigate and then releases things (or when someone initiates a dispute and cancels it). I'd be a bit worried about that.

As such, I don't think anything is going to change at this moment. Obviously something went awry here, but it seems like a potential one off. If we get any more reports of something like this, changes may become more needed.

 

[Rob]

Ok, fair enough. It hasn't affected me as I handled everything manually. I can't see many people would buy something they already have so not a problem for me. Just thought I'd report for prosperity