In frustration, I stopped looking at it for a few days to get some other projects done. I come back and Deano has a fix done 3 days ago!!! It works! At least it seems to at this point. Awesome!!!

I believe i have payments with PayPal fixed. Make sure your PayPal settings in the payment module are set to direct and you have IPN and PDT shut off in your account at PayPal.

Replace modules/cheetah/payment/classes/ChPmtPayPal.php with the one from the repo here. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CheetahWSB/Cheetah/master/modules/cheetah/payment/classes/ChPmtPayPal.php

I am running php 7 as well, and some of it may have to do with that. Seems the function isset has some differences in php 7 which is preventing a piece of code in the module that seems perfectly fine to me to fail.

I bypassed that during testing and run into other problems. I did see some differences in what PayPal returns that does not match what the module is looking for.

So i believe i am dealing with 2 issues. 1) changes with PayPal, and 2) php 7 differences.

I might just end up rewriting the payment module. I need to add subscription support anyway.

Deno; I have a 7.4.2 site that is Dolphin.  It accepted payments when it was at 7.3.5; I have upgraded it to 7.4.2 so I will see if I can test payments and let you know if it works on Dolphin or not.  PayPal has been doing a lot of changes lately so it probably is PayPal.

I have been doing some testing and found that payments don't work at all. Both the pay to join and purchasing of memberships both fail when PayPal returns to the site with the message No Data Given with the payment module configured for process type direct.

I will still have to do testing with IPN and PDT but it would appear something has changed in the data PayPal returns.

I am surprised no one on the Boonex forums has brought this up yet as it can't be working properly in Dolphin either.

Sorry, but this is going to take a while. I have a lot of testing to do, and perhaps a lot of code rewrites to get things working.

@Steve, thanks for taking it so well.  Sadly  it  isn't a perfect world. The only way any program will work exactly like you want it to is to have it designed from the ground up. The old Dolphin is already bloated and I believe Deano is correct in his desire to remove "Pay on Joining" from future versions because it was full of problem in the old Dolphin model and from all accounts it's something that the average Joe doesn't need.

We all make the mistake of getting bogged down with a feature we want and I'm a perfect example. I held my site up for over a year because I wanted to be able to separate Adult Content from normal content.  I had members who didn't want to be exposed to  Adult content. I wasn't alone and a few members on the Dolphin Forum encouraged Modzzz to build such a module. He spent far too many hours on it, but what he did for me never suited the other people and visa versa. Sadly Modzzz wthdrew the module rather than fixing it and it looks like Deano is planning something similar. When I explained what had happened to my members, one of them said "Why don't you do this?" The solution was in front of me since day one, but I couldn't see the forest because all those bloody trees were blocking my view.

The solution was as simple as asking members to become a friend of another member before they could see that person's adult content. All a person had to do was mark his Adult photos or posts "Friends only"

Thus, my suggestion to you is this: Firstly, sort out your ability to actually use Paypal before trying to get it to work. They may already be blocking you. Their Adult Site policy is very strict. You may have to get credit card facilities or use the facilities already owned by the Club.

Secondly, do what Deano has suggested and allow people to join, but not be able to see certain content. I'm not sure how far you can take that, but you should be able to block most things.  Once they've joined, then allow them to upgrade through facilities that already exist and do seem to work.

Alternatively, in your invitation, you could supply your banking details and ask the prospective member to deposit $xxxx in order for their subscription to be validated.

Once that is done, you could either create a profile for them by hand or use Modzzz's  Module  "Admin Add Member"

https://www.boonex.com/m/admin-add-member

This will allow you to add a member, create a unique password and send the details to the person when you get their money. They don't even have to create a profile, just update it when they sign in.

Finally, if none of the above are suitable, consider an external subscription script. I'm sure there are many to choose from and at least one should allow you to do what you want.

There are hundreds of third party modules on the Boonex store and most should work okay with Cheetah when they've been converted using Deano's free script.

In summary, I suggest you focus on the main site and let the subscription side sort itself out while the site is being developed.

Just my thoughts

I appreciate the comments. I believe I am working on a unique situation that doesn't fit into those formulas. Everything I am asking is about how to get this thing going. it could be me, or the next person. But all this needs to have answers to have Cheetah be successful. So let's just focus on how to make Cheetah work great for everyone, even if we don't understand, or agree with, the business model.

Many of the people on some other forums didn't like the business model chosen by Deano, but I do. And chose Cheetah in large part because of it. I think over time Cheetah will do well if people like you and I stick with it, and Deano will do quite well as people migrate away from the other business models that promote a "pump and dump" attitude from the developers.

My site is very specific. I have a lot of people waiting for this site. They all know each other quite well, so it is not a bunch of random people from around the world. They want a private, paid, invitation only site for their communication that is in no way connected to outside social media. If this works, I have other groups just like them that want the exact same thing.

My parents generation couldn't understand why anyone would pay for cable TV, when TV was free over the air. Yet cable has done quite well, even though their business model seemed crazy at the time. I truly appreciate all the help. I have a plan. My method may seem to be madness, but I am only asking how to get Cheetah to work. I'm not asking for any investors, or anyone outside the specific group I am building this for to be members.

Thanks again for all the help.

- Steve

I'm about to play the part of the Devil's Advocate here. I'd write to Steve personally, but I think what I'm about to say may benefit other new users when they're thinking about running  a site.

Before you start a subscription site, you must first ask "What does the site offer and will people continue paying once they've had a look around?

Some porn sites are successful in this regard because they continue to supply new material on a regular basis. Other porn sites fall by the wayside far too quickly because they fail to generate new material, or the quality of the material doesn't warrant people paying dollars to continue subscribing.

I don't know of many other sites that ask members to pay upfront.  Music sites, photo sites (if they charge) usually do so on a "per item sold" basis. 

If you build a site assuming that the members themselves will make the site interesting enough for others to want to pay, you first need a swag of members. Dating and Hook-up sites are a good example. They charge people to meet other people who also paid, but where did it start? Nobody is likely to join if there's only 50 members, all of whom live hundreds of miles away. The successful dating sites usually start with thousands of  members, often taken from an other sites through some kind of affiliate program.

Other dating sites offer a multi level membership with "free" members having limited facilities such as one message a day, or one photo. Almost every site I've come across works this way and some are quite successful.

As I said in another post, I only know of one site that charges before you can join.  They do get the odd new member only because they're a niche market and they're supported and promoted by other organisations in the niche.

Regardless of how you plan to finance your site, you must first have a product. You can't start a cruise line unless you own a ship. If you don't own a ship, you can charter one from someone else, but you can't  ask people to go cruising with you, hoping to earn enough money up front to build the ship.

Therefore it's best to figure out how you can develop a site, attract products and members, and then you need to spend  time working out how you can capitalise the site further down the track.

Deano's suggestion tat you let people see what you have to offer first is by far the best solution. 

Getting Paypal to work is just the first step in a very long chain of obstacles you face when building a subscription site. Paypal doesn't like refunding money, so it has a very strict policy of not supporting "Adult" sites, because this is an area where people constantly request refunds. Paypal's interpretation of "Adult" needs to be clearly understood.  If I've read their policy documents correctly, an Adult site is any site of an "Adult nature".

It won't take Paypal long to find out whether a site owner has pushed the boundaries. If  and when they get caught, Paypal may ban them, possibly withhold funds and may even start litigation. Either way, the site will no longer have access to subscription payments and nobody wins.

I can get papal to do a live transaction and the money transfers, but coming back to the site it comes to a blank page saying "Transaction verification failed", and doesn't recognize the upgrade. 

Thanks @Geek_Girl, I will be in touch tomorrow.

I will be happy to come into your site and take a look at your settings to see if I see any obvious things that might be keeping the memberships levels from showing up.  I will be fairly busy tomorrow during the day but can come on later.  I am GMT -5.

I wish I could help you on the Pay to Join but the only time I worked with it on a site, we could never figure out the proper settings both in PayPal and Dolphin (this was an old Dolphin site) to get it to work.  They decided to just give up on it and I was more than happy to do so.

This is important; if you haven't set a membership level as purchasable, then it won't show up to your members.

There is also the Promotion level; here you can give access to features of the site for a limited time; which allows your new members to get a taste of what you have to offer.  You can have it where they can view everything on the site but not be able to add content.  You can set this for a limited time after which the members will revert back to Standard membership.

If the membership modules is installed, i assume it is if you have memberships setup already. Then there should be a link on the members account page in the account control box on the right side of the account page that says "Upgrade Options" That will take them to the membership module showing them all memberships that have a price set.

 This is a reasonable solution, and I will try it. I have new membership levels, but cant find how to set up a way to allow the upgrade purchase.

Than paypal is sending them back to the wrong page. It believe PDT and IPN both need to be off on the paypal side.

I got it to go to PayPal, successfully make the charge, then it gives a blank page on return. It looks like the info page is being blocked from the non-member seeing it, since they are not yet a member until they fill it out and have a user name and PW.

From what i understand on this, you need to make sure PDT turned off at PayPal. The payment module in cheetah set to direct mode.

But i strongly recommend a different solution other then pay to join. Such as changing the settings to the standard membership so members can't do anything without purchasing a membership. Then setup new membership level that they purchase that gives them access to everything.

This is the way most sites do it.

It's going to take a quite a while to debug that pay to join feature.

I will have to do some testing on this.

The pay to join feature was implemented by boonex in dolphin which cheetah is a fork of.

That pay to join feature is buggy as hell and i am removing it for new installs on the next version.

I see if i can figure out how to get it working.  

Changing to IPN doesn't fix it.

"you are not logged in"... When the new person tries to sign up, they have not made a profile yet. So they can't log in yet. They hit join, choose a member level, then go to PayPal. When they return from PayPal there is the no way for them to make a profile to log in. That is my problem. Returning from PayPal gives the "no data given" box.

I'm using PayPal because that is in the payment module. Do you have, or need, a different module for authorize . net? I'm open to anything to get this going.

second guess - when this happened to me, it was because of me not having the correct settings regarding the ipn vs the other option(s). i ended up using ipn and got it figured out - but that was many years ago and i ended up switching to authorize . net anyways.

i am going to take a guess here. looking at your page, you are not logged in - so there is no user id to attach to the end of the url. i see /0 - which would mean no profile - which would mean - you get no data given. it cant give data to or for a person not logged in.

YES... typo in the heading. That should read:

Payment Result - no data given

I have slogged through permissions and turned on everything I can find for everyone, and no difference for this issue. Attached is another shot of my return page showing the return address. Please help.

Hey folks, I am so close to having this going. When dealing with the payment, the payment goes to the site but the return page gives "No Data Given" instead of the new profile sign up,  Attached is the screen shot of what I am getting. I am sure there is some setting that I need to flip.