ERROR: Viewing window for donation receipt

Further information on my environment: I am running Give in Test Mode and have it connected to the Braintree Sandbox Gateway.

Hi there,

That sounds like a PHP Session issue. Currently our donation receipts page has some limitations. Let me explain a little:

1) When a donor is NOT a logged in user of your website it gets tricky to save information about them. We use what’s called a PHP Session cookie for that information.
2) This means that the only way that user can view that information is if they visit the page from the exact same browser with the exact same device they made the donation with. So if they made the donation on their phone, but tried to visit the donation receipt link from their desktop you’ll get that error. Same thing if they made the donation in Chrome/Desktop but tried to view it in Firefox/Desktop.
3) PHP Sessions can also be cached accidentally, so make sure that you exclude your donation receipt page from any caching you use.

Suggestions:
1) Make sure you have excluded the donation confirmation page from all types of caching you might have on your site (via plugins or your hosting).
2) You might want to consider asking your donors to create an account on your site when they donate. You can enable that per form with Give. This would allow them to view their Donation History whenever they wanted.
3) You can also customize the Donation Confirmation email to output ALL the donation data rather than just the link to the Donation Receipt page.

Thanks. I’ll look into this. There error was generated on the redirect immediately after my transaction test, so definitely in the same browser. However, I had just been logged in to the site prior to logging out and testing, so definitely could be some session confusion.

We will definitely be encouraging folks to setup an account so they can access the history log and eventually setup those recurring gifts.

I’ll poke around with any caching conflict and report back. Thank you for the quick response!

Still no luck in solving the issue. I checked, and the site has no caching plugins enabled, unless there is something host-side. I removed all PHP_SESSION cookies from my browser and tested a direct visit to the giving URL. Processed a transaction and received this same error. Also tried in incognito mode and in Safari with the same results. I’ve not tried disabling other plugins on the site or reverting to a default theme, yet, as the site is live. Could it be that Testing and/or Sandbox donations fail at some point with guest visitors? Or could it be some SSL? I suppose I could take it live and test a guest donation.

I did customize the confirmation email, so that will give them proper info. We will also encourage them to setup of that user account.

Ran some additional test and I am also getting this error after having logged in as a current user and attempting to process a donation. The transactions are processing well, except for the error that is thrown on the confirmation page.

HI there,

Honestly, I’ve never encountered anyone having issues with the confirmation page while logged in. That really suggests aggressive caching somehow. Do you have W3 Total Cache installed or some sort of database caching or object caching? Try disabling them completely, clearing them, logging in new and trying again. I know that doesn’t help solve the problem, but it would help to narrow it down to the actual culprit.

I had this same problem. I disabled my caching plug in and the problem went away

Hey Guys – We’ve worked out some bugs with this functionality. You can view the issue here: https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/407

Here’s the PR: https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/pull/427

This fixes this scenario:

1. Go to wordpress user list.
2. Create user with email id.
3. Create donation form and make donation with the above email id without login.

You will get warning message as the email id is already present in the user list.

—-

We are rolling this out in 1.3.2

If you have strict caching on your site you still may run into the issue if there is a conflict with retrieving the session and the donor is not making a user account when donating.

Thanks, Devin! I think this may very well be the reason (or related) why I was encountering this error. Thanks for your work here!

Thanks @uamv We also just pushed out version 1.3.2 today which hopefully improves reliability overall as well.

I’ll close this for now, but if either of you have more info on this please feel free to open a new ticket. Thanks!

Hi – not sure if i’m too late to jump in on this but would love instructions on how to do this ( i can see where to edit the email receipt, but don’t know how to “output all the donation data…):

3) You can also customize the Donation Confirmation email to output ALL the donation data rather than just the link to the Donation Receipt page.

Hi @quicksmith

I just responded to your inquiry about that here:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/editing-receipt-viewed-in-browser?replies=7#post-7775690

Thanks!