I have noticed with all paypal donations - the member donating seems to be tricked into registering with paypal. Is there another page that the member can just fill the donatation amount with there visa/switch details? I see what the script does for the members (giving the oppotunity to earn benefits for donations.)But if I just want to add a donation button to my postbit for example that allows the member/guest to just fill in there card details and the donation will be paid into my paypal account.

If this is not possible, are there any websites that allow this type of donation service that you guys know of?

Please PM me with any suggestions. Thanks in advance.

Cloudrunner, great hack by the way. You deserve a frickin' medal my man!

MT

Shorty--

The only way to expire the goals at the moment is to remove them. I fogot to add the delete function into the admin manager. It's in me Todo list

Bouncer, I'll look into that, but really do not see the relevence of it since if the user donates a penny, it's pretty much not a donation now is it since Paypal takes that penny away ;)

Heffe--

At the moment it cannot be done due to the way Paypl implements their IPN system.

0zone--

Have you enabled them in the admin options for the donations? You have to tell the system that you want them to show up, this is in the donations options section of the adminCP. And thank you ;)

Marulatree--

Thanks for the praise, I needed that today. Unfortunately Paypal requires the folks to activate an account with them for you to accept their payment. There are a couple of other payment gateways available to do the visa straight through, but they require you to pay up front and hold a merchant account with them (which requires a credit background check etc.), and the ones that do not require this are not written into this hack ;)

Cloud -

Having problems with that transaction where I had to manually to enter the user into the contributions table - the "has contributed xxxx to the board so far" isn't showing up under his name.. I've checked the entry and everything and the userid is correct so I can't think any reason it wouldn't be working.. ideas?

Hm.. how come my thing don't show up in the forumhome and postbit? I added the $donations_needed already..
Please help

First of all...thanks for a superb hack!

This makes things so easy for me compared to the manual labor I had to do for each contributing member.

I was looking for a system like this for a long time and I can't believe I found this! heh...

I have some minor requests, if that's ok. I figured since this is beta still that you won't mind...

1) Usergroup
Having the option to automatically move a contributing user to a specified usergroup upon successful/completed donation. I have a separate usergroup for contributors, giving them access to special forums etc on my site, and it would be great if the system could automatically transfer them to a usergroup admin specifies when their donation clears.

2) Delete function/Expire function on goals
Being able to expire goals would be great. Especially if there was some sort of automation, where if you flag a goal as "purchased" or "reached" it would then go away.

For instance, if you're setting up a goal to reach $xxx for a software/hardware addidtion to the site, and you reach that, then you're able to flag that goal as reached and that particular goal is removed and/or archived :)

I say Archived because it would be cool to have a list of "Goals Reached". This would show the contributing users that their donations are in fact helping the site. I realize this might be a little redundant, so it's just an open suggestion. :)

3) Donation Amount Explanations
One of the plans on our site is to set up the different donation amounts for users to quickly choose an amount they want to donate and thankfully that's already in there. One thing we do on the site is to offer some different perks depending on amount donated and it would be really great if we had a text field to write these in on each donation amount. For us it would just be a bulleted list of perks per amount...

4) Donating to a specific goal
This is more of a user-side suggestion. Some users are likely to want to donate their money to one goal in particular. Let's say you have 5 goals set up on your site. These are goals adding different features to your site. User X wants to donate $xx to goal #1. Is there any way to have donation buttons per goal so the user can click desired amount for a goal and have it reflect his goal donation in the Item Title of the donation as his contribution done towards that particular goal?

I don't know if that makes sense, so let's clearify.

Let's say we have goal 1 and goal 2. A user wants to donate to goal 2 as this seems to interest him. He clicks on a button for $20 under goal 2 and goes through the donation steps.

An E-mail arrives to system admin as always. In the Email it says...

------------------------------
Payment Details:
------------------------------

Total Amount: $20.00
Currency: U.S. Dollars
Transaction ID: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Quantity: 1
Item Title: Site Name - Donation towards goal2name
Item Number: 1
Invoice ID: xxxxxxxx
Buyer: Name Surname

Just an idea of course :) It would open up possibilities for separating goals on the frontpage of forums too and show how much is needed for the different goals etc...

Well, here I am suggesting a ton of stuff. I honestly am VERY happy about this system. It makes my life easier!

Of the suggested features I would have to say I personally would really enjoy the usergroup feature the most, seeing how that's something we rely on.

I bet other sites using this system takes advantage of the usergroup powers as well...but I might be wrong of course :)

Thanks again and keep up the stellar work!

*Clicks Install*

anyone help me?
please?

I installed the hack, but in my admin, I cannot see the other options except the first one. I remember that there should be an option for managing goals, awards, buttons, but cannot see them, why?

I ran into a problem and I wanted to see if anyone else could replicate this.

Someone made a donation through the paypal system, testing it's functionality for me. An error occured and I made some changes to the system as they received an error too.

Error that arrived in my Inbox included:

I refunded the donation to the person in question through the paypal system since I couldn't find any option to do this through this system's admin.

When I did that I received an email containing:

When the person went to make another donation she received the following:

So does this mean a person cannot make more than one donation through this system? What happens if a person wants to make monthly donations to the site?

How come when the donation was refunded to the person I got a 'new payment transaction' notice?

So far the system looks real nice and with some html edits I got it looking real nice. Now if I can figure out these little 'errors' I'll be a happy user! :)

Cloudrunner, I enabled everything in my admin options under donations, but alas, still no buttons. I have made sure I have uploaded it into the right directory, so there is no problem there. I had absolutely NO errors whilst installing this hack.

I am stumped. I really want to use this hack :(

ozone, do u see an option under Donations that says Add button? If you don't, your installatin is not complete.

when someone makes a donation and paypal sends them back with ?=sucess you get this...
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: vbmail() in /home/sports/public_html/ppfunc.php on line 127

put then if you go to paypal.php the donation shows....

Sorry I've been away for awhile again guys ;)

Alas, with the personal side of me life I've not had much time still to work on the hack I am still working on it as time allows though. I will see what I can do for all problems encountered since my last post tomorrow. Please be patient with me...

vbhost - you are not running the latest release of vbulletin as the vbmail function was added in 2.3.0 :)

- miSt

any help please?

goto that user's information in the user table and change the donation field to '1' (this is the check to see if that specific user has donated or not).

Got into your adminCP and in the options for the donations make sure you have turned the options to show these items on ;)

Run through the thread here and you'll find the fixes required to repair this bug. I have not yet updated the release to reflect the small alterations to the database, but this has been addressed.

You will probably have to delete this donation from the database to fully repair the problem as well, but do the fixes first them try it before you remove the donation from the DB.

I'll need to look at how your setup is bro. I'm kinda stumped on this one as well...butI canna help with that level of support at the moment as I've real life to attend to at the moment...I'll be able to hit the pavement again hard soon, but not until after I clear up some ++++ in me personal side of life first ;)

Hope you understand.

Yes, I double check, and it is there and I have check all to yes

awesome.. worked great. Thanks again!

Great hack Cloud. i will sure install it soon.

folkware seems have some very very interesting suggestions. Do you plan to consider them ??

Thanks for such a nice and iseful hack !

Thanks

Cloud.. few more troubles =)

gotten two donations today, and both of them came back with an error:

Invalid SQL: INSERT INTO paypal_funds (id, date, donated) VALUES ('2P391627PJ628391M', NOW(), '95.8')
mysql error: Duplicate entry '2P391627PJ628391M' for key 1

Invalid SQL: INSERT INTO paypal_funds (id, date, donated) VALUES ('10S829370N231235D', NOW(), '4.55')
mysql error: Duplicate entry '10S829370N231235D' for key 1

I got an error message saying:

"Error Detected

This invoice has already been paid. For more information, please contact the merchant. "

I don't understand, I am trying to test the paypal using a visitor account. I don't even get to enter my credit card information yet. Just click on the donate button and I got the above error message? Why?

It was working twice last week before I installed the Archive hack. I wonder if the archive hack screwed something up???

so how can I use the vbmail function with this hack if I am on 2.2.9??? This hack, according to cloud, does not work with 2.3.0.

I am getting the same error for vbmail.

Help please.

thanks.

actually jc it was designed and written using 2.3.0 ;) So it is 2.3.0 compliant, but the others I'm not sure of.

Shorty, Find the records in your database that have only a few characters in the id field and remove them (or edit them to something random to match the length of the txnid from paypal: i.e. 17 characters). What is happening is that your old donations are in there as one or two characters and as they are being put in your are getting duplicat ids cus mysql ignores the rest of the code. This is a side effect of the last fix that I made to the db.

I'm am still working on this folks, so please be patient, I still have a new baby that requires about 95% of my attention anymore ;). The next update will be within the month.

Skyline -- did you make sure that you did all the changes verbatim?

verbatim?
What is verbatim?
i know i did all things in the instruction

verbatim means word for word.

post a screen capture of you admin CP for the donations hack here and I'll see what I can come up with.

so if I don't use vb2.3.0, I cannot use this hack because of the vbmail problem that I had??? is there any substitute for vbmail?
is there a way to turn off the vbmail functionality?

Thanks.

jc2002, you can try changing the vbmail() functions to mail() instead. That was the old code for sending e-mails which was changed in 2.3.0. Not sure if it'll work correctly, but it's worth a shot.

thanks i'll try

How do you add a goal? I can't seem to find it in my AdminCP

it did not work using mail().

anyway, now I have another problem. After I installed paypal hack, I cannot do a full database dump any more. It always stops at one of the paypal tables. I think one of the tables has a problem with empty column.

Cloud -

I already did that, I'm wondering if it didn't update the keys for these records?

The weird thing is that they are getting inserted into the db, just giving me and the donating user an error before it does it.

Firstly, great hack, reading notes from proposal to install, very good material.

Apologies if this is already known, but in summary:
Auto complete IPN causes duplicate txn_id insert attempt.
Default post back of txn_id causes VERIFIED display only.
Refund sets all funds to 0.
Refund does not reduce contributors sum.

Assumption: guest processing. Not permitting guests to this page, at present...

Okay onto my experince, not sure if a few bugs are known or if it's a recent change at PayPals end.

Basically the first few payments where a manual deny was issued worked a treat, the user was returned to the success page. Although the payment was still pending in my account (to be denied or accepted) So I accepted it, thus enabling the autocomplete processing in paypal, so now each payment that comes in is appearing as completed.

So initially this hack worked, then the continue button induced the duplicate keys bug as eluded to previously, so I checked the id's all was fine, ran a few more through, same issue.

After going throught the code it seems that the IPN is beating the continue button process, but still by default it seems posting back txn_id. As such ppverify is picked up and processed where by the insert is run at 104 regardless at this point. For a completed status where the entry is already in the db I cannot see why this is needed. So I commented it out and the process began to work, except now I was rewarded with just the word VERIFIED, so I modified the paypal to do ppverify.php processing and sucess/cancel, it all seems to work again, apart from duplicated payments amounts, the update circa 139 was commented out.

I created a multitude of credits and refunds, it seems to be working now...

I then began to check what was happening for refunds, it set's all funds to 0.00 not the txn_id record passed in for the refund. Also noted the contributors table was not downdated for the refund. So I added an SQL in for that.

Has anybody else noted this behaviour, are the fixes in, if needed atall?

Does the fact I'm a UK user of paypal, the transactions appearing as complete immediatly have any bearing?

Apologies if this is a wild goose chase and I really do appreciate the hack, newborn pressures on time, so one for everybody else to ponder over :D

Colin.

vB2.3.0

I'm having problems with the success page, all that is displayed is the word "VERIFIED"

There is no HTML whatsoever on the page, viewing the source code just shows the word "VERIFIED"

The transaction is logged correctly, and all of the information is stored, but the user is left with blank page seeing the word "VERIFIED" when they should be seeing the thank you/successful text page.

Any ideas?

Voltron,

As per the post above, I modified paypal.php to do the ppverify processing and the paypal.php processing. There is an obvious (sorry not at dev machine to qoute source) if else statement that tests for Post vars, I changed this to a If/End around the inluced for ppverify, this still processes and displays VERIFIED, but also the sucess page texts.

Intresting you have the same symptom as I had. I'm not saying what I have done is correct, just it now appears to work, original mod worked fine till I added the CC and payments were automatically confirmed.

Cool hack indeed. However I have a couple of important questions.

I've been loving the VB3 integration of PayPal. However, there are some bugs with it and stuff. Is this one any stable?

I'll be looking to use a hack for PayPal with vBulletin but can it be labeled as a "subscription" rather than a "donation". Maybe there are examples somewhere?

The reason that I wanna really go back to 2.29 or 2.30 is because of all the hacks that are available for them. vbindex, vbhome, etc are stuff that I would really need. VB3 has no support for that.

Anyway, you can see my dilemma:

VB3 = Has PayPal, but its a little buggy, but has no widespread hacks like 2.x

VB2.x = Stable, with a lot of hacks, but doesnt have PayPal integrated.

If someone could shine some light on this for, it would be great! :)

Thanks!

This is a great hack, very useful.

I do have one question, is there any quick way to change the currency symbols etc to GBP instead of USD on all the screens?

Oh, if only it would be more easy to integrate into other vB hacks ...

Anyway to make it so that members are the only ones that can donate?