Hi there,
Perplexing problem - a member signs up, his role is defined in the backend, but then disappears after a day or two to leave the member with no role. Please advise asap!!
HELP - Member role is there, then disappears!
Today, another member who recently was renewed by PayPal but he was demoted to a free subscriber today. “Demoted by s2Member: Mon May 3, 2021 12:04 am UTC” – I looked at PayPal and he is paid up. Please HELP!!!
My client just lost 3 customers today because of this problem. One is reporting him to PAYPAL. I would appreciate it if someone could PLEASE get back to me asap.
Just a quick question… is this site’s Membership giving / taking access based on a user’s “Role”?
Yes. User role is correct at first, but then disappears, sometimes the complete registration disappears apparently.
My client has been trying to input the members by hand. PLEASE HELP.
Would this have anything to do with it:
Call to Action
If you are implementing any Access Control List (ACL) or filters on IP addresses for the IPNs received from PayPal, we request that you add all the aforementioned IP addresses before May 3, 2021 .
Doing so will help avoid missing IPNs from PayPal.
Please, can someone get back to me?
OK, so now the members are disappearing from the site. PLEASE SOMEONE GET BACK TO ME!
OK, so could someone get back to me about why no one is getting back to me… please. We have an emergency situation here, where members are being deleted from the back end of my client’s site.
Anyone?
I’d really appreciate it if someone could get back to me. Thank you.
Hi Jeff.
Sorry I wasn’t around the forums the last week and didn’t see your thread until now.
If you have the Auto EOT Behavior enabled, then it would either demote or delete the user on EOT time. I don’t understand why it’d first demote and later delete him, it’d be one or the other if it’s the EOT behavior.
And it brings up the question about the EOT time being set so soon if the subscription is active.
I need to look closer at what you have and the logs. I hope you left them enabled since last time.
I see that logging was disabled. I just re-enabled it so we can get more details.
I see that the EOT configuration is enabled and set to demote. That would change the user’s role to “Subscriber”. It would not leave the user without a role, and it would not delete the user.
I will create a test user with a 1 cent subscription to see if I get that behavior.
Do you have the IDs of users that got this problem? What role did they get when this behavior happened?
@Lost45, that really doesn’t sound like s2Member behavior at all… 
And is it consistent for every signup, or only some get it? If only some, do they seem to have a common denominator? Does it happen to free registrations too, or you didn’t get any of those to see?
@intuitdesign, did you test for plugin conflicts? It sounds like something else in your setup is causing this. I certainly don’t see this behavior happening to others, so there’s something particular to this setup that is bringing it up…
Do you have a clone of the site? Did you try reproducing this behavior in a clean installation on that same server, to see if you can reproduce the behavior there? https://s2member.com/kb-article/common-troubleshooting-tips/
From the plugin names, I don’t recognize which one could be causing something like this. I’ll need you to do the plugin conflict test on a copy of the site, or a clean installation and add the plugins as you test, so we can narrow down what is introducing the problem.
I see in your must-use plugins, that you have a couple files for s2. Can I see their code? (I can’t open them from the dashboard, and I don’t have the FTP)
I just did a test signup and all went well. I got the role I was supposed to, and the new account seems fine so far.
Have you had the problem with all subscription plans, or with some specific ones? From the users that you had to help, can you tell what subscriptions each got? Trying to see if there’s pattern there.
Looking at the Users list, sorted by ID descending to have the latest ones at the top (/wp-admin/users.php?orderby=ID&order=desc), I see several (from user ID 403 up to 414) with no role or other details, even their name is missing. Only the one I just created has its details correctly (ID 415).
I can’t tell from that what they are supposed to have, though. From the registrations log file, it seems like most of them got Level 2 (the monthly plan).
User 403 is a test user from Jeff on Feb 7th. My test user from the previous troubleshooting is user 408. Whatever happened, affected those that used the previous buttons as well as the fixed buttons, so it doesn’t seem related to the button used.
It’s almost as if something had removed the latest rows in the usermeta table. So the users still exist in the users table, but their extra details are missing from usermeta. If you search for some of these users in usermeta, can you find any rows?
That is not something that s2Member would ever do. I don’t know if some plugin would cause that, either. Can’t say what would…
Could you contact your web host and find it out if they have any record that may show when the usermeta got affected that way, and any details they could provide?
I look forward to your updates. 
Thank you Cristian,
First, would this message from PayPal to Barry do anything?:
Reminder: Important information about Instant Payments Notification (IPN)
As a reminder, communicated through email in the first week of December 2020, PayPal is expanding the Instant Payments Notification (IPN) infrastructure used to notify merchants about events related to the status of PayPal transactions. This change has added seven new IP addresses from which IPNs are being sent since January 18, 2021.
Below are all of the IP addresses that are being used for IPN.
(IP here)
(IP here)
(IP here)
(IP here)
(IP here) (New)
(IP here) (New)
(IP here) (New)
(IP here) (New)
(IP here) (New)
(IP here) (New)
(IP here) (New)
Call to Action
If you are implementing any Access Control List (ACL) or filters on IP addresses for the IPNs received from PayPal, we request that you add all the aforementioned IP addresses before May 3, 2021.
Doing so will help avoid missing IPNs from PayPal. If you have any further questions about this migration activity, please feel free to reach out to Merchant Technical Support (www.paypal-techsupport.com).
Thank you,
PayPal
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Will there be any service impacts?
IPN delivery to the merchant will fail, if a merchant does not add all of the aforementioned IP addresses found on the Status Page (https://www.paypal-status.com/history/eventdetails/31029) before the cutover date, May 3, 2021.
What are the actions required by merchants?
Please forward these changes to your network team/system admin or if you are using a third-party hosting service provider forward these details to their technical support team. If you require further support, please reach out to Merchant Technical Support (www.paypal-techsupport.com).
Merchants implementing any Access Control List (ACL) or filters on IP addresses for the IPNs received from PayPal, need to add all the aforementioned IP addresses before May 3, 2021. Doing so will help avoid missing IPNs from PayPal.
Are these changes coming up only in Production?
Yes.
EOM from PayPal
From Cristian:
Do you have the IDs of users that got this problem?
From Jeff: Yes
(What role did they get when this behavior happened?)
Since March, they got the role they signed up for, everything looked fine, then after an hour or so, they were stripped of everything except for their name and email.
Creating a duplicate test site will take a bit. I can turn the plugins off and on, but what changes or effects am I looking for exactly? How shall I conduct this test?
(I see in your must-use plugins, that you have a couple files for s2. Can I see their code? (I can’t open them from the dashboard, and I don’t have the FTP)
I believe I sent those to you in March.
The database is showing the same rows as what’s on WP.
(Could you contact your web host and find it out if they have any record that may show when the usermeta got affected that way, and any details they could provide?)
We’ll check with the hosting and report back soon! Thanks Cristian!
First, would this message from PayPal to Barry do anything?
No, that’s unrelated and isn’t a problem.
Since March, they got the role they signed up for, everything looked fine, then after an hour or so, they were stripped of everything except for their name and email.
Got it. Well, they kept the info that is stored in the “users” db table.
What is missing is the data stored for the user in “usermeta”. “usermeta” is where s2Member saves its data for the user.
The database is showing the same rows as what’s on WP.
Do you mean the “users” table? I meant if you could search in the “usermeta” table for rows that correspond to one of the user IDs that are missing role and other details (from ID 403 to 414).
I believe I sent those to you in March.
Ah, thanks. Sorry I forgot about it.
Creating a duplicate test site will take a bit. I can turn the plugins off and on, but what changes or effects am I looking for exactly? How shall I conduct this test?
Got it. Well, first you need to be able to reproduce the behavior, then you can make changes and see if the behavior changed or not.
So far, the test user I created earlier today, is still with all its data.
By the way, I checked the users again, and see some IDs missing: 404, 407 and 409. I believe those are the ones Barry mentioned had disappeared. My guess is that what caused the “usermeta” rows to disappear, may have had that effect on the “users” table sometimes.
Whatever is doing this, seems to affect only the latest rows of the table, although I see some usermeta data missing from other users, but only partially (e.g. sorting by “Last Login Time”, you’ll see many rows without a time, but with a role and a “Number of Logins” higher than 0, so the logins count usermeta row is there, as well as the role, but the last login time row is missing).
Very weird indeed. I don’t know what is doing this…
I look forward to your web host’s input to solve this mystery.