Patreon Wordpress Plugin Giving Access to Declined Pledge Patrons

Here’s the issue.
After I create the locked posts and publish them on the WordPress site, the post content should only be visible to Patrons who had their pledge go through (Processed).
But the posts are visible to people whose pledge didn’t go through (Declined).
Note: My Patreon Creator Page is Charge Upfront enabled, and this issue seems to be because the Plugin is still working with the previous system.

I am not using the Plugin on my main site, but here’s the sandbox site,

http://ahmadshahzad.pro

Cause I can’t put more than one image as I just registered, here’s the link to the post with the 3 images.

http://ahmadshahzad.pro/index.php/the-issue/

The below image is the Post Content showing even though the pledge was declined. I checked it on three accounts, it remained the same. People can access the Posts even when their Pledge is declined. And it was checked on three different computers, two in my country, one in another country. So, it isn’t an issue on my side having cache or cookies or something.

I presume it is working on the former system when Charge Upfront wasn’t mainstream. But this needs to be corrected/developed/whatever it is called!

Some points to check out:

  • Is your site doing caching at any level? Site level, or server level? Do you have a caching plugin which is set to cache content for logged in users?

  • When were the patrons declined? Is there any info on the date?

Both with and without caching.
The site I linked above is a test site I just created. No caching.
The Patrons were declined over the last few days. Not all, only a few. And it was their first pledge. I only stumbled upon it through chance when my Editor had his pledge declined and told me about it. So I tested it with other accounts inside VM to see if it was a caching issue. It is not a caching issue. I turned the Plugin off on my main site and am posting on Patreon Page, but it isn’t very efficient for me.

Also, I signed up using new credentials to the site, and used the Patreon account on the site for the first time as well.

Was the pledge declined with an error or a message, or just they went through the unlock flow without receiving any message and then ended up with a locked post at the end?

Im posting my reply to him via DM, included with OP’s DM reply to me since he is rate-limited from posting due to being a new member of the forum:

This is the natural behavior based on the subscription model Patreon currently has. Patreon says a subscriber is a legit patron, hence plugin accepts.

This is a complicated situation. Technically the person has subscribed to you, but him being charged is another matter. The chances are high that if the initial attempt is declined, it is tried again after some time, and tried a few times before it is labeled as ‘declined’. This is normal in most subscription services.

When you get your Patreon account running again, we can look into this further. For now there doesnt seem any major mishaps with how plugin behaves in your site.

Thanks for your help on the matter!

1 Like