Billing Issue and Issues Posting Blog Posts

Recently we move to a new production and staging environment on ActiveRain as part of the transition away from our previous ownership. While the transition has gone relatively smooth, there have been some issues that have cropped up in the last three days.

We have three of our best developers looking at these issues right now, but they may have an impact on certain members (but at this point it doesn't seem that everyone is being impacted). I'll do my best to explain the issues here and give you a way to resolve them if you are someone impacted by a specific issue.

Billing Issues:

Charged Successfully but System Acts As If You Were Not:

Right now, there is a billing issue where our ActiveRain system does not want to recognize successful billing events. Members are being charged for their Rainmaker account, the billing is working successfully, and then the member is sent an email saying that we were unable to charge their card (and even worse) the system is removing their Rainmaker status.

Short Term Resolution:

If this has happened to you, please reply to the email you receive and let us know about the error. I can go in and manually comp your account so that your Rainmaker status remains active while we resolve the issue in the database.

Some Members Double Charged:

Right now we have identified 20 occurrences where a member was double charged. Some of them happened over the course of two days (billed on the 16th and then billed again on the 17th) and some happened over the course of one day (billed twice on the 17th). 

Short Term Resolution:

I have a developer letting me know about double billing occurences. I am making my way through each of these instances and voiding the duplicate charge. As long as I catch them soon enough, the transaction can be voided and it shows back as a credit on your card within 24 hours. If we are unable to catch them soon enough, the transaction has to be refunded and those refunds can take 5-7 business days to occur.

Blogging Issues

Pop Up Asking To 'Stay on Page' or 'Leave Page'

Currently, many members are experiencing a pop up window when trying to 'publish' their blog. It looks something like this:

Short Term Solution:

Make sure to hit the 'save' button prior to hitting publish. From there, when you hit 'publish', you may get this pop up box (it doesn't seem to be happening to everyone......although I could be wrong). You should be safe to go ahead and hit the 'Leave Page' option and that will actually publish the blog post and send you to the next page where you can then choose to share your post on social. 

We have identified this issue and have a fix almost tested. After that we will work to get it deployed to the production server. 

Issue with Blog Editor Formatting:

This one has been a little perplexing. Some members, after running into the above pop up issue, and navigating past the issue, are seeing that when their post actually publishes, the formatting seems to be all out of whack.

Short Term Solution:

Clear the cache on your browser. In almost every instance where I have come across this, the blogger is someone who constantly stays logged in to ActiveRain on their browser. We cache certain things in order to make the site perform more efficiently for our members who visit often. It's possible we are caching more than we should be, and a member who continues to come back day after day, writing many many blog posts could be picking up something in the cache that is causing the blog editor to insert some bad code in a brand new post. We have someone looking into what we cache and if there is stuff we should be flushing more regularly.

Blog Posts Reverting to Draft Mode after Publishing:

Some members are reporting that blog posts will revert back to draft seemingly at random after the post was originally published. Members are reporting that they publish a blog post. Then after receiving a comment, when they go back to the post, it is now sitting in draft mode.

Short Term Solution:

Go back in and make the post public again and re-publish it (PITA, I know). HOWEVER, in order for us to solve this, I need someone to send me a link to their draft post that was previously public, and then some time after receiving the first comment, the blog post was reverted to a draft. If someone is willing to let their post sit in draft for a bit while our team looks at that issue, that would be a big help.