If you made a donation to a trail association on Trailforks via our Trail Karma feature and the transaction went through on PayPal but is not recorded on your Trailforks account, this may be due to a setting on the trail association's PayPal account when receiving the donation.
Does Trailforks receive donations made to trail associations?
Trailforks does not receive donations via Trail Karma. A Trail Karma donation is a direct transaction between the user and the trail association's PayPal account.
Why is my donation not showing on my Trailforks account?
Trailforks hosts the link to the trail association's PayPal account. Part of the Trail Karma transaction requires certain data points that Trailforks sends to Paypal, including an Instant Payment Notification (IPN) callback URL. An IPN is a message service that notifies the user of events related to PayPal transactions.
The IPN URL is accessed by PayPal after your donation is made and informs our database that the payment was successful, so that Trailforks can record it on your account.
The trail association's PayPal account could have several things blocking the data transfer. As a user, you may have to contact the trail association and refer them to this document to resolve the issue.
What are some common reasons that a trail association's PayPay account is blocking information to the Trailforks database?
1. The Trail Association's PayPal account might not accept your currency. It's common that US PayPal accounts only accept USD, but the donation made was in another currency, such as CAD. In this case, the trail association needs to login to their PayPal account to approve your donation. Once approved, the IPN signal will be sent to our Trailforks database, and your transaction will automatically be recorded.
The trail association will also want to change their PayPal settings so future donations in different currencies are automatically accepted.
As the manager of the trail association's PayPal account, go to this page and ensure that "Allow payments sent to me in a currency I do not hold" is enabled.
2. Issues with the trail association's PayPal not sending IPN data to Trailforks. The trail association's Paypal account may have IPN messages disabled, or the account may be in a state where PayPal has disabled IPN messages on the account due to a previous IPN URL set that failed a number of times.
On the user end, if you have made a donation but the donation is failing to show on your account, please contact the relevant trail association and provide them the link to this article.
As a trail association, how can I fix the IPN data sent to the Trailforks database?
1. Check if an IPN message was sent out related to a donation on your PayPal account here.
If an IPN message has been sent and the status is showing as such, then the issue is likely with the Trailforks database. If this is the case, please contact us here.
2. Check this page on PayPal to see if the setting "Do not receive IPN messages (disabled)" is checked and a URL is entered in the "Notify URL" field.
If a PayPal account had a custom IPN notification URL set-up at some point, but the URL is no longer being used or it fails, PayPal will automatically disable all IPN messages on the account, including custom ones sent for a Trail Karma donation.
If an account has NEVER set a manual Notification URL (and the setting itself is disabled), an IPN message is still sent when a custom notify_url is passed with a payment (this is the process that a Trail Karma donation undergoes).
However, if a URL has been set on the settings page and is set to disabled, then ALL IPN messages are disabled. When IPN messages are disabled, Trail Karma donations are not recorded in our database as PayPal did not send us the IPN message needed to record the donation.
To re-establish the connection between the PayPal account and our Trailforks database, you will have to set a notify URL that returns a status 200 (not failing). Then, check the "Receive IPN messages (Enabled)" option.
Trailforks has setup this URL that a trail association can enter when re-establishing the IPN connection. When a Trail Karma donation is made with a custom IPN notify URL, PayPal will override the URL used during set-up with the notify URL passed in the donation data.
The IPN feature setting may be related to stopping donations; while this is not verified, it's worth checking. The trail association can change to the default of "Accept PayPal Payments before API permissions or credentials are set up" by going to this page.
