Tokens expiring? Grayed out Patreon level boxes

Wordpress Plugin
1

I’m occasionally having an issue where the paywall levels in my post editor are grayed out and show a message that says:

“Post locking won’t work without Creator ID. Please confirm you have it here.”

But then when I click over to Patreon Wordpress Settings and compare with my Patreon account Clients & API Keys, everything seems to match up.

I’ve even manually refreshed the token and entered the new info, and that doesn’t seem to fix the error.

I’ve had this problem a few times now, and sometimes this issue seems to just fix itself after awhile. But today it is persisting quite a long time. In the meantime, the paywall function on my site is broken.

Has anyone else experienced this, or have possible suggested solutions? Thanks!

2

As i mentioned in my reply to your email, it is possible that the plugin may attempt to refresh tokens if it notices that it is not able to contact Patreon API. This may happen if the plugin is unable to connect to Patreon due to host/server connectivity issues in between your host and Patreon.

Therefore it would be good to pay attention to when this issue occurs and if it happens at certain hours or under certain conditions (high traffic on site etc).

Please keep an eye on this and keep us posted - we would like to make sure this is not a general issue, even if there hasnt been anyone else who reported such a situation.

3

tom, is this issue still occurring? It is not reproduce-able on a test installation and the code involved seems to be functioning right.

Contacting your host to ask them about any firewall or security solutions that may affect connectivity in between your site and Patreon API may provide some pointers.

4

Yes, it has been happening to me too, I don’t have a high traffic it normally won’t pass the 100 access a day, I use Wordpress and it happens really often…

5

Same issue here too, ever since the “To be able to receive the latest features, security and bug fixes, please update your plugin by clicking here” banner started never going away, it always claims my Creator ID isn’t input even though it is.

Also, I was able to update the field by just removing the readonly tag in the HTML and saving.

6

It’s happening again right now. So frustrating. Any ideas why this keeps randomly occurring every few weeks to me? Thank you.

7

FWIW since you mentioned high traffic on site as a possible factor above, we are not experiencing heavy traffic at the moment.

8

Sorry for barrage of messages, but one question I have right now is: What should I do, if anything, to try to fix this? Just wait until it hopefully fixes itself, or should I proactively refresh the tokens and enter the new info? I have done the latter when this has happened before but it doesn’t seem to have fixed the issue, at least not immediately – but maybe it takes time to work out. Just wondering if I should do that now or instead sit tight.

9

In the next versions we may have a form of log to tell the site admins of connectivity issues in between their site and Patreon. But currently such issues like load, traffic etc need to be debugged from your host.

You dont need to have your site experiencing high traffic to have load or i/o issues - if the server you are hosting your site has load, due to any reason (ie, another site hosted at the server), then your site will inevitably get affected.

Where are you hosting your WP site?

10

I’m hosting on a DigitalOcean droplet. Should I refresh the tokens, you think, or just wait it out?

11

Surely just refresh the tokens to ensure continuity of service at your site.

But also it may be a good idea to contact DigitalOcean and tell them about the situation and ask about load or connectivity on your droplet.

12

Thank you. I just refreshed and the notification on the Patreon Wordpress Settings page reported, “Patreon WordPress is now ready to go and your site is connected to Patreon! You can now lock any content by using the ‘Patreon Level’ meta box in your post editor!”

…

but the Patreon Level boxes are still grayed out in my post editor.

13

If you wouldn’t mind helping me figure out how to articulate the problem to DigitalOcean, I would greatly appreciate it. I’m not a developer so I want to make sure I am not misstating anything.

14

If they are still grayed out, then you can try checking if your Client ID and Client Secret are correct too. They may have changed.

15

You can open a support ticket with them and ask them whether any traffic or i/o load issues exist on your server, and tell them that you have an api integration with Patreon and it seems that you may be experiencing connectivity issues from your server to Patreon API.

16

So my website dev was able to spend a little time looking into this today and he reports:

I looked through the server logs and I’m not seeing any errors from there with Patreon requests. They are all in the good “access” logs. It’s very strange that it would work some of the time, if something was blocking it, it should be consistent. Server stats for the last week look stable and normal as far as load, etc.

There is something in WP called WP-Cron that does scheduled tasks and if that isn’t working properly that might be it but that’s just a guess.

I think you should ask the CodeBard guy if there is a way to get an error code out of this - either via his plugin or a mini-plugin we could use just to test the connection - and you can tell him we searched the Nginx logs and there is no Patreon stuff in error.log and many successful hits in access.log

Any ideas based on that appreciated. Thank you very much!

By the way, as an update: the issue did seem to end up fixing itself (unless if it’s the case that a token refresh just takes hours to be enacted) this evening, after my paywall was down for most of the day.

17

If timeouts are not recorded in access_log or error_log, you may miss any issues. Same for package drops in between your server’s network and Patreon.

Token refreshes shouldnt last hours. Ill bring this to the attention of the team.