Ben Meredith

Hey @johntafur

I am not able to load that site very well at all, it’s giving me errors related to the SSL certificate.

That said, the error you’ve pasted in here is what would happen for one of two reasons:

1. A form created with the new visual editor (released yesterday) had all of its setting mysteriously deleted.
2. A form created in the 2.x options-based editor has something saved in such a way that the v3 editor *thinks* it’s a v3 form.

So to get to the bottom of things, a few questions:

1. Is the form in question one that you created with the new form builder, or the old form editor? (If you don’t know, or if you created the form before yesterday, it’s likely the old method)
2. Are you knowingly adding anything to the post_content meta for GiveWP donation forms. (This might be being done by some other plugin or the theme)
3. Also, please send along your System Info. Navigate to Donations –> Tools –> System Info (tab) and click the button to “Get System Report” and copy/paste that in your reply here. That will give me some more context to be able to help.

Hey Tim,

Following up here (a few days, several back-and-forths on your priority ticket including some videos helping to isolate the problem, and lots of personal attention later) to just publicly say this appears to mostly be an issue with the Alone theme by Bearsthemes. As I said in my reply on your ticket: we’ve tried for years to get the folks over at Bearsthemes to answer our calls to help our mutual customers, but they just don’t seem interested in doing that. We even wrote a public blog post calling them out, to which they never replied.

The offer stands to get you moved over to the KadenceWP theme, where I can guarantee that you will not have the issues you are having with Alone.

Hi @longwhitedigital

It’s a bit of a long answer, here, but the short version is that while there currently *is* a way to disable user creation, that’s going to eventually be going away, so I need to give you a bit of context/explanation.

GiveWP’s primary focus is raising money for your organization, which involves some privacy issues around things like access to the receipt, access to donation history, etc. The last thing we want to do is to expose things like donor address or donation history to unauthorized site visitors.

WordPress itself has a true and battle-tested permissions system (users and user roles) that is best suited for that purpose. At all times, the WordPress user system is aware of the logged-in user, and GiveWP is able to display things conditionally to that particular authenticated user.

GiveWP has a separate system currently for user authentication using email addresses known as “email access” which has served us well over the years, but admittedly does not do as good of a job (especially on sites where caching is involved) with authentication.

It’s a simple matter of scale.

The GiveWP email access system is tested and maintained by a handful of developers. The WordPress user system is tested and maintained by thousands of developers, and deployed in live environments representing billions of active users.

For that reason, we’re eventually (though not immediately) moving away from the email access system toward all donors having user accounts on the site.

Important points:

1. The GiveWP user roles never have additional access to or control over any site data (other than obviously the data pertaining to their OWN donations, and even then it’s read-only.)
2. You as a site admin do not have to tell your donors that they have user accounts on the site. It can be completely hidden from them by disabling the email that is sent with their password reset, and by hiding the admin bar from the top of the page. We’re happy to help with that, and would point you toward some third party plugins to do that hiding of the admin bar.

What you experienced when you changed your admin user to Give Donor user is very intentional, and illustrates my point: once you were just a Give Donor and no longer an admin, you had no control over your site.

Happy to answer any questions, for sure.

They have not announced a date, but it’s definitely going to eventually be sunset, so it’s worth getting that executive on a call with them, and walking through that process sooner than later.

Better to fix the issue before there’s urgency, for sure!