Spinning this off from T260910: Civi: Recur fail message sent to active recurring donor
Donor #874927 cid=47825273 recently received the recur fail message before their recurring had definitively failed. It's canceled now, but when we checked in this ticket the third renewal attempt had not finished. Maybe this is related to the initial donation being charged-back at Ingenico?
Can someone check to make sure Civi is not sending the recur fail email before the status is definitively failed?
Amber spotted two more cases where the Status was still In Progress, like cid=29132710 or Failing, like cid=37782621
I think we may need to escalate the priority of this bug.
It seems Civi is sending these message to donors when they fail and not when they cancel, and this is leading some to set up new donations upon receipt of our message, when the donation does in fact eventually process on the second or third attempt, leading them to start a duplicate recurring because of our outreach.
CID 12768203 received our message and his donation has since processed successfully.
Additionally: CID 29015040 has been sent 3 emails on 3 consecutive days, each time the recurring failed, prior to it definitely cancelling. He reached out to us and asked us to stop sending him the messages (ZD #888801). The also has a separate, active recurring donation still live via PayPal, and I thought we were scanning to exclude those who had active recurrings. @jgleeson is that correct?
Change 647740 had a related patch set uploaded (by Ejegg; owner: Ejegg):
[wikimedia/fundraising/crm@master] Only send fail email on donation cancel
Some updates from standup today: this looks like this was due to a patch in the last 2 weeks from @jgleeson. @Ejegg has a patch to fix this but we need to assess how many people actually started a new recurring donation. Then issue a bulk cancelation of the older recurring donations for those people. Someone should be able to check the donor's activities in civi to see if they got that email and if they started a new recurring. that should allow us to pull this list of donors. Let's keep talking if that list is hard to pull.
Change 647740 merged by jenkins-bot:
[wikimedia/fundraising/crm@master] Only send fail email on donation cancel
Change 647770 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jgleeson; owner: Jgleeson):
[wikimedia/fundraising/crm@master] Add test to confirm failed recurring email behaviour.
Just to confirm, the patch in place will move the fail email back to after the final attempt when the recurring is canceled?
In terms of followup for the donors who may have been affected, fr-tech can generate a list of donors who got the automated email before their existing recurring canceled fully, who created a new recurring donation? If that list could differentiate those whose previous donation really canceled from those whose existing donations continued, that would help prioritize any response that Donor Services does. We appreciate the digging to find the affected donors! Will look forward to learning more at Friday standup.
This was deployed before the recurring batch for Dec 11 GMT started, so we shouldn't see any more of these. As confirmed on IRC, the patch makes sure we only send an email on the final failed attempt, when we cancel the recurring donation.
Tomorrow I'll get DS the list of folks who got at least one message and include info on what each has for canceled and non-canceled recurring records.
@MBeat33 and @krobinson there's a file with affected donor up on the filesrv under fundraising/Tech/T269372.csv
It's got just the 33 donors who got that email after 11/24, who created a new recurring after 11/24, and who now have more than 1 recurring in 'In Progress' status.
The 'cancelled' column in the CSV only counts the number of recurring subscriptions that were cancelled after 11/24. The 'failing' column would be the number of subscriptions that have 1 or 2 failed attempts, but that count is zero for all the donors in the CSV.
Thanks @Ejegg
Can I confirm if we have a list of all those who received the email but whose donation didn't actually cancel and is still continuing?
I have seen two cases this week where the donor replied to the email telling us they had donated in a lump sum instead (in the wife's name, so not the same CID) and one where the donor set it back up under a different email (therefore different CID) and so it would be good to know how many live ones where we told the donor it was cancelled are out there, to then decide what to do with them. These are not as straightforward as the 33 where it's the same email, and may be harder to find, so it would be good to know how many of those were not actually cancelled during the period.
We then need to figure out what to do with those ones too, as we have informed them the donation has ended, but it is still, in fact, live. Ethically we should probably either cancel these or reach out to the donors and let them know that the email we sent was in error and the donation is still live and ask if they want to remain a supporter.
Sorry all for falling asleep at the wheel on this one, and also for introducing the bug in the first place! Thanks for the cleanup @Ejegg
I'm trying to check over Ejegg's file to see if it helps with @krobinson's latest post but the fileserver is timing out for me grrr. If I still can't get on the fileserver then I'll try pulling out the list of emailed but not cancelled donors and add the CIDs here, as that query for that should be straightforward enough to run.
Thanks again!
OK, the list of 421 CIDs of people who got the email but whose donation has not been cancelled is in P13545.
We can get a CSV up with contact info as soon as the VPN starts working.
Change 647770 merged by jenkins-bot:
[wikimedia/fundraising/crm@master] Add tests to confirm failed recurring email behaviour.
Opening this one back up as we received an inquiry from a donor who got the fail notice for their January donation when it actually succeeded.
ZD 909419 / CID 45618242
Donation completed on 01/05 and email was sent on 01/07. That said the donation does seem to have subsequently cancelled, but the January payment processed. I would imagine this email should be sent in February if anything, when that donation fails, not after the successful one processed.
Could somebody look into this please? Cheers!
for CID 45618242
They made a separate one time donation for the same amount ($1.75) that wasn't tied to that cancelled recurring donation's id.
So looks like they independently made a one time on (1/5) and then the card tied to the recurring went through the failure process and the email got sent (1/7).
Thinking about this one again there is something weird about it. Did the donor mention they got a fraud notification and then later on approved it?
#909419 on Jan 8th the donor said:
I made a manual donation on Jan. 5 of $1.75. Please check your records. Your Katherine Maher sent me a THANK YOU email in response on Jan. 5. Your system CANNOT automatically collect the monthly $1.75 from my credit card because the card stays LOCKED.
4008977447 the transaction was not manually settled at status 600
@Cstone I was just talking to @MBeat33 and we are wondering if this person really does have some sort of ability to lock their card and if that affected the attempt to start a recurring donation. I'm inclined to leave this one go and wait for more evidence form other donors.
@Mbeat if this person really does want to start a recurring donation and keep it going, they might need to adjust this "lock" on their card. I'd love to hear more about this mechanism if they are willing to share.
Thanks @DStrine, I'll ask them what their bank calls this feature, and also whether the monthly conversion was intended or not
#909419 replied:
My LOCKED card is a feature offered by my bank. It is optional as to whether or not I lock it. I keep it locked because lots of merchants have my credit card number.
cid=603426 had two active recurring donations, and got the email when one failed.
We're also seeing some donors respond to the recurring fail message that they made a one-time donation after their recurring stopped but before they received our email, like cid=4462656.
I am not sure how the code works for this, but could we make it so that if the donor has made any donation since the recurring fail, we do not send the email?