Support

June 3, 2013 at 8:41 pm

We have had something really strange and worrying happen with our latest release of classes.  On 2 different dates, some of our users have registered for classes, paid with PayPal, and an email was sent to our admin email address, but they are NOT in the attendee database!  Of course, this effects our open seat counts, and general accounting in the database.  It does not happen for every registration, and so far I cannot replicate the problem.   As far as I know, it is also not happening for people who choose to pay by check.

I am at a bit of a loss about how to troubleshoot this.  The question is, was the attendee record inserted into the database and then deleted somehow, or was it never created?  If it was never created, would it be possible for me to have an admin email with the full form submission of our registered user, complete with registration ID (guid)?

I have checked the error logs, and though I did see an error like “WordPress database error MySQL server has gone away for query” – it was NOT for a date that we had the problem (in fact, that error message date was before registration opened), and the query was not the attendee table.

I thought maybe the web server and SQL server lost communication for a moment, but the error was trapped and hidden by the PHP code, so the end user never knew.  I checked with HostMonster, and they checked their logs and saw no indication that the SQL server was down on the dates and times we had the problem.  They think it’s some sort of coding error.

I looked in the includes/process-registration/add_attendees_to_db.php file and saw there is some logic in there to delete rows from the attendees table if people seem to be jumping back and forth between pages and messing up session info somehow.  Is it possible that the user successfully registered and continued on to PayPal to pay, and then went back in their browser and caused their record to be deleted?

I turned on the debug.log and will scour that log for more information, as well.

Do you have any other ideas of things that I could check on this?  Has anybody seen this problem before?

Other info: I did update the payment_overview.php page (and it is in my uploads/espresso/templates/ dir) to save some additional information from people who choose to pay via check (the check number and bank name) to the attendee table transaction_details field.  But I don’t think that is related to this problem, since it happens with PayPal users.  Unless I need to call a wpdb->flush() command there or something I’m not doing that could mess up the progression of things??….  but it seemed like it made the most sense not to flush the wpdb cache there.

I am running Version 3.1.31.3.P

Thanks for any help you can provide!