redsand

Hi Clive,

We received your support request at the WP-SpamShield Support page and responded within an hour of receiving it. Did you not get our response back?

– Scott

Please note that the WP-SpamShield Support page is our main support venue, not the WordPress forums here, so that will always be the best way to get a quick response and resolve any tech support issues.

Hi Victor,

I noticed your support thread on the Event Espresso site: https://eventespresso.com/topic/wp-spamshield-and-event-espresso/

It sounds like they are having some trouble implementing the fix.

Josh from Event Espresso emailed me back today, but hadn’t mentioned anything about them having trouble implementing the fix. Sounds like we have a failure to communicate. 🙂 I emailed them back again to let them know we’re available this week to help if they are having problems implementing the fix.

WP-SpamShield already has whitelisting for PayPal IPN, but it appears to not be helping in this situation. It would be extremely helpful if you would do the following:

1. Go into your WP-SpamShield settings and turn on “Blocked Comment Logging Mode” with the option “Log All Comments”. This will log every submission that the plugin processes, whether blocked or not. (Please do not post your logs here on the forums or anywhere online…these should only be submitted to us through the WP-SpamShield Support page.)
2. Then, run a test PayPal transaction, so that the plugin can log the blocked request.
3. Submit a support request at the WP-SpamShield Support page, and when we email you back send us the log data.

This will allow us to see exactly why your PayPal IPN requests are getting blocked, and then we’ll see what we can do to help fix that.

– Scott

Hi Victor,

We actually sent them the code to fix that issue about 6 months ago. 🙂

The Event Espresso developers had contacted us and we responded back within an hour of them writing us, and provided them with the code they need to fix the compatibility using WP-SpamShield’s hooks (code that other plugins can “hook” into). For best security it should be fixed on their end. It’s only about 4 lines of code and quite easy to implement. Unfortunately I guess it hasn’t been implemented.

If you’ve already gone into your settings, and used the option “Disable anti-spam for miscellaneous forms.”, then the plugin wouldn’t be blocking PayPal IPN any more.

When you make a change to your site, and nothing happens, there may be a caching issue. Does your website have server caching or any caching plugins installed? If so, you should clear the cache after each time something is change on your site.

If you haven’t had a chance to yet, please take a few minutes to work through the FAQs and Troubleshooting Guide.

If working through the FAQs and Troubleshooting Guide does not fix things for you, then I’ll need you to head over to the WP-SpamShield Support page (our main support venue), and submit a support request. We’ll need to get a little bit of additional info, and email back and forth with you.

– Scott

You’re very welcome! 🙂 Outstanding! Glad to hear everything is running well again. Let us know if you ever need help again!

– Scott

Fixed in 1.9.7.4.

Here’s the fix, in case you would like it before the next release.

Replace line 6510:

if( 'admin' === $notify || empty( $notify ) ) { return; }

with this:

if( 'admin' === $notify || ( empty( $deprecated ) && empty( $notify ) ) ) { return; }

Replace lines 6522-6523:

$user_message .= __( 'To set your password, visit the following address:' ) . "\r\n\r\n";
$user_message .= '<' . network_site_url("wp-login.php?action=rp&key=$key&login=" . rawurlencode( $user->user_login ), 'login') . ">\r\n\r\n";

with this:

if( !rs_wpss_is_wp_ver('4.3') ) {
	$user_message .= sprintf(__('Password: %s'), $deprecated) . "\r\n"; /* $deprecated is the pre-4.3 '$plaintext_pass' */
}
else{ /* 4.3+ */
	$user_message .= __( 'To set your password, visit the following address:' ) . "\r\n\r\n";
	$user_message .= '<' . network_site_url("wp-login.php?action=rp&key=$key&login=" . rawurlencode( $user->user_login ), 'login') . ">\r\n\r\n";
}

I’ve used WP_DEBUG and even set WPSS_DEBUG to true with no results.

Excellent. Still good though…that will rule out a lot.

wp-spamshield.php lines 6490 – 6528 function wp_new_user_notification. This is where it “interacts with the process of sending the emails from the site”.

Incorrect. The wp_mail() function sends the emails. That function wp_new_user_notification() – filters the text included in the email. That’s a huge difference. That’s why I say that the plugin does not interact with the process of sending the emails from the site. What I said is still correct.

That function is an adaptation of the core WordPress function wp_new_user_notification() in the includes/pluggable.php file. What happens there is we take the code from the current version of WordPress, and then add the WP-SpamShield mods to it.

The line you want to comment out is in the core WordPress 4.3 code as well – includes/pluggable.php:

if ( 'admin' === $notify || empty( $notify ) ) {
		return;
	}

However, you may be on to something. I compared the code of the function in WordPress 4.3 vs 4.4.2, and I found that the line in question was changed in version 4.4 to this:

// $deprecated was pre-4.3 $plaintext_pass. An empty $plaintext_pass didn't sent a user notifcation.
	if ( 'admin' === $notify || ( empty( $deprecated ) && empty( $notify ) ) ) {
		return;
	}

An empty $plaintext_pass didn’t sent a user notifcation. (SIC) Boom. so that sounds like the issue.

Try replacing the line you commented out with that one. We’ll run some tests on our end as well.

Hi Endymion00,

Yes WordPress made some changes to user notification emails, but that was a change to the content of the emails, not to how they are sent. After the issue in the 1st thread you referenced was reported to us and confirmed, we added a fix in version 1.9.5.7, roughly 6 months ago, and it included compatibility for version 4.3+ as well as WordPress versions below 4.3. That particular issue would not be related to your issue.

As noted in the 2nd thread you referenced:

WP-SpamShield doesn’t turn off or interfere with new user notification emails in any way. If you have any other plugins that interact with the registration process, it’s possible that one of them is interfering with it or disabling it. We’ve seen quite a few plugins that interact with the registration process that aren’t coded very well and have some issues like this.

Please see FAQ #4, which directly addresses the issue you are having: “Q: The contact form emails, new user notification emails, or comment notification emails never seem to reach my inbox. What might be causing this?”

As noted in the above FAQ, the issue is most likely not related to WP-SpamShield.

If your client is experiencing any issues with their site, the first thing they need to do is upgrade their site to the latest version of WordPress. This is noted in the WP-SpamShield Troubleshooting Guide, steps 3 and 11.

– Scott

Please note that the WP-SpamShield Support page is our main support venue, not the WordPress forums here, so that will always be the best way to get a quick response and resolve any tech support issues.