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Nov 2009

Recently I have received a few emails along the lines of the following when sales are made at my site and I don't understand what they mean because it looks like the buyer is receiving their normal download email and receipt etc.



It says:



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Notification sent to Ashley Karyl Photographer - www.nudephotopro.com

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This is a notification that for the transaction cb-XXXXXXXX, we were unable to notify your server as we were unable to connect to it.



It never used to happen and it's coming from e-junkie so I wondered what it means?

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    Nov '09
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    Nov '09
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That would indicate your Common Notification URL or Payment Variable Information URL is not responding. If you are using that latter setting for PDF Stamping, then there is something amiss with your file, so the Stamper cannot open the file to modify it. As I recall, we helped you get this working recently, so have you uploaded a new PDF file to replace the one that was working earlier? If so, examine the settings for your new file to make sure it meets our Stamper's requirements.



If you get the Stamper working with a given file, it should always work reliably with THAT file. If you upload a new file, you need to retest to confirm the Stamping will work with the new file and, if not, figure out what settings are different in the new file that's made it incompatible with stamping. The usual problem regards password security settings, either using an incorrect author password in the Stamper URL, or saving the file with a security compatibility level set too high.



We recommend uploading PDFs without any original password protection, because the Stamper can generally handle those flawlessly, and the Stamper always adds its own, randomized author password to each file anyway. A read-only password where you give out the password along with the file is about as secure as putting a lock on something but leaving the key in the lock; anyone who wants to share that file will share the password along with it, so what's the point? :^)

No I haven't made any changes to the file or the PDF stamping code. I did try switching from ClickBank to the e-junkie cart which is when the problems started, so I switched back to ClickBank. A couple sales after that went OK, but then tonight I had one and that same error message came through.

I have just verified that the the PDF stamping code is the same as the one you gave me and that the file has not been changed since September. It was uploaded with zero protection as you suggested, so I am relying on e-junkie code to allow printing but not copying.

OK, I just ran a test purchase and it all went through OK including the stamp, which would suggest that the code and everything is correct at my end. This is the only time I have had this problem while using ClickBank.



When I tried switching to the e-junkie cart system recently it gave this error every time. During the test process, it allowed me to go through to the thank you page and download the unstamped/unprotected file before the email had arrived. Strangely, if I waited and clicked on the download link from the email, the subsequent PDF would then have a stamp, so something appears to be wrong there.

This has just happened again with the server notification problem. One sale went through overnight with no problems, but the last one a few minutes ago failed. This means files are going out with no stamp on them and zero protection...



What is going on here?

Just had another sale, but this one went through fine with no server notification error, so presumably the PDF stamp was included with copy protection. I have changed nothing about the PDF stamping code or the file itself, so I can't see how these frequent but inconsistent errors are caused by something that I might be doing wrong.

I have replied to your other email to request the Transaction IDs of affected transactions where you received the "unable to notify server" notification, so we can investigate those particular incidents for you.