WHMCS + PayPal broken today

[ramnet]

For the last 12 hours the WHMCS PayPal payment gateway has been broken.

 

Talking with other hosts I am not the only one affected by this.

 

The issue is that WHMCS passes the "lc" variable to PayPal's website. After doing some tests, if in my code I don't pass this variable to PayPal's website, it is working perfectly today.

 

Perhaps it's time for the WHMCS developers to remove the LC variable from the PayPal gateway module?

 

Edit: This appears to primarily affect users from non-English countries as WHMCS will send an LC for a foreign language.

Edited July 27, 2011 by ramnet

[GGWH-James]

"lc" is a valid variable as per PayPal's documentation. Provided that the value being passed by WHMCS is valid, then the issue would be with PayPal and not with WHMCS.

 

With that said, even if the value were invalid, PayPal should display the checkout page in the default language of the seller's country; from what I recall of what PP_MTS_Chad had said in a prior posting at the PayPal developer network anyway.

 

My best guess at the moment would be that it's a PayPal issue rather than a WHMCS issue. However, I've not experienced this with any payments as of yet to say for certain.

Edited July 27, 2011 by GGWH-James

[ramnet]

Aye, it's a PayPal issue.

 

I initially thought it was a whmcs issue since Ubersmith was working fine.

 

loc=CN is the only language having an issue. Apparently changing this to loc=HK is a temporary fix.

 

http://www.hostloc.com/thread-68549-1-1.html

 

The fact that this is still broken 3 days later says a lot about how much PayPal cares about this.

[adam.burst.net]

I am also having this issue, however it only seems to be affecting customers who have their billing contact country set as China.

 

It seems that the LC variable is being populated by using the country code, rather than by the language preference set in WHMCS.

[adam.burst.net]

According to PayPal Support(over phone), the LC variable is meant to identify the language that you are using to send them data, not to identify the customer's language.

 

I fixed the issue by editing the viewinfoice.tpl file and changing {$paymentbutton} to {$paymentbutton|regex_replace:'/<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="[^"]*">/i':''}

 

This isn't exactly a great fix, but it will keep the issue from preventing customer payments until WHMCS can fix.

[hexonet]

Hi,

 

we run into the same issue; implemented the following as a hotfix:

 

- edit the template file viewinvoice.tpl

- replace {$paymentbutton} by the following block:

 

{php}
$paymentbutton = $GLOBALS["smarty"]->get_template_vars('paymentbutton');
if ( preg_match('/form action="https:\/\/www.paypal.com/', $paymentbutton) ) {
	$paymentbutton = preg_replace('/<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="[^"]+">/', '', $paymentbutton);
}
print $paymentbutton;
{/php}

Hope that helps!

 

Best,

-jens

[WHMCS John]

Please take a look at http://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?t=40302