Onsite Rebilling has been Paused

MemberMouse 3.0+

Recent versions of MemberMouse handle subscription billing entirely within your WordPress installation, rather than relying on a central server to trigger rebills. In some situations, you may see the following message in the administrative panel, indicating that rebilling has been paused:

MemberMouse periodically checks for maintenance issues that could result in unwanted billing, and automatically pauses rebilling if potential problems are detected. Billing may also be manually paused in the plugin settings.

This message only concerns rebills performed using on-site, card-on-file payment methods: Stripe, Braintree, and Authorize.NET CIM. Subscriptions purchased via other payment methods are controlled by their respective payment vendor, and are not affected by local billing settings.

Restoring from a Backup

Since billing is handled entirely within your WordPress installation, restoring a backup of your site resets the rebill schedule to a previous state. This means that subscriptions that have already billed are scheduled to run again. By pausing rebilling, MemberMouse provides you the opportunity to review recent payments, and by using Upcoming Payments, skip rebills that have already run.

Your first step should be to log into the administrative panel of your payment vendor and view recent charges. Customers using Stripe can click Payments, while those using Braintree and Authorize.NET should visit Transactions and search for dates since the backup was created.

You can use this information together with the Upcoming Payments page to skip payments that have already processed. When you skip a payment, MemberMouse will schedule the next payment in the subscription based on the original rebill date. Payments may be skipped individually or in bulk.

Please note that WordPress is not designed to allow plugins to detect when a backup has been restored. MemberMouse uses features of the individual payment services to detect when a backup has been restored, but not all payment services offer these features, so we cannot guarantee that a restore from backup will always be detected.

Once you are satisfied that Upcoming Payments accurately reflects only subscriptions that have not yet billed, you may Resume Local Billing.

Staging Environments

Professional web developers often use staging sites when creating and updating websites. Staging sites allow multiple developers to work together, and project managers to proof changes and finalize a project before rolling it out to a production server.

MemberMouse performs a license check-in during activation and periodically during normal operation. If the site is operating with the sub-domain staging, has a domain of localhost, or has a TLD of dev or local, billing will be paused automatically. Billing should remain paused on staging sites.

It has come to our attention that some customers populate their staging sites by cloning from the production environment. We strongly recommend against the use of production data to populate staging sites, as it can result in duplicate billing, and other unwanted behaviors such as unexpected emails and changes in third-party systems. However, we understand that for some developers, cloning to staging is an essential part of the workflow. Please read the following carefully to help prevent duplicate billing.

Cloning a site to staging necessarily changes it's URL, and MemberMouse pauses billing when this change is detected. Please leave billing paused on your staging site.

Next, please be sure that your staging installation is configured with a valid staging license. You can determine whether your site has a valid staging license in MemberMouse > General Settings, using the Manage Install > View License menu. Once this tab is opened, click Refresh License to initiate a license check. If you do not yet have a valid staging license, please deactivate the plugin, and Request a Staging License from our support team.

If your MemberMouse site is already live and serving members, it's critical that under no circumstances should you “push” the staging site to production, or otherwise overwrite the production environment with data from the staging site. Doing this would result in a loss of member data and return the billing schedule to a previous state, resulting in duplicate charges for members.

For additional protection, see our article on Production Databases Copied to Staging Sites for information on how to remove all scheduled payments and stored payment tokens from your staging site.

Changing the URL of your Site

In some cases, you may wish to change the URL of your production site. Changing the site URL will trigger MemberMouse to pause billing. If your only action was to change the site URL, you may re-enable billing immediately. However, if you've simultaneously migrated to a new hosting environment, please ensure that the original environment is no longer operating and review any recently-processed payments to confirm that there are no upcoming payments that need to be skipped.

Resuming Local Billing

Once you are satisfied that billing should be resumed and no unwanted payments are queued to run, you may enable billing as follows:

1. In the left column, choose MemberMouse > General Settings
2. Select the Other Settings tab
3. Locate the option Local Billing Scheduler Settings
4. Mark the checkbox Enable rebilling via the local scheduler
5. Click Save Settings