# Patreon does not appear to be syncing on our instance
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/patreon-does-not-appear-to-be-syncing-on-our-instance/398944
**Category:** Support
**Tags:** patreon, hosted-support
**Created:** [March 21, 2026, 4:56am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/patreon-does-not-appear-to-be-syncing-on-our-instance/398944 "2026-03-21T04:56:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@djwtwo](https://meta.discourse.org/u/djwtwo)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2026, 4:56am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/patreon-does-not-appear-to-be-syncing-on-our-instance/398944/1 "2026-03-21T04:56:35Z")
We’re on a hosted instance on discourse.group. We have the Patreon plug-in configured to update a group called Patrons, and anyone of any tier should be included in that group. Right now, despite over 1000 active patrons on Patreon, this group has only ~70 members, which seems like it’s far too small, especially considering that except for a few people given direct invites we’ve only supported people signing in with Patreon.
It has been two days since the sync has run according to the plug-ins panel in admin, contrary to documentation that suggests it should run every 6 hours, and that last run coincided with several people being dropped from this group, and a failure in the log (that appears to be a response from CloudFlare and not [api.patreon.com](http://api.patreon.com) itself.) We see similar failures at roughly two week intervals.
Clicking the “Update Patreon Data & Sync Groups” button in the plugin’s admin panel appears to do nothing (we have verbose logging enabled for the plug-in, and nothing is logged.)
I do not personally have admin access to the Patreon account we’re tied to, but if I use the creator token set up for the plugin against the API endpoints (with curl) it does work and I am able to get valid responses, page through pledges, etc. There was an earlier thread that suggested that the request limits for that instance needed to be increased; I did that on our instance but it appears to have had no effect.
I’ve looked at a few relevant threads:
- [Initial Update Patreon Data & Sync Groups doesn’t seem to work](https://meta.discourse.org/t/initial-update-patreon-data-sync-groups-doesnt-seem-to-work/90599)
- [Patreon Plugin Not Updating](https://meta.discourse.org/t/patreon-plugin-not-updating/74618)
- [Patreon reward group users got wiped out](https://meta.discourse.org/t/patreon-reward-group-users-got-wiped-out/159650)
But from what I can see it just looks like synchronization isn’t happening either manually or on a schedule, or at least not on the 4x daily schedule the documentation implies, and as we’re not self-hosting I think I’m at the limit of what I can inspect myself.
---
### Author:  [@Cazadividendos](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Cazadividendos)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2026, 7:39pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/patreon-does-not-appear-to-be-syncing-on-our-instance/398944/3 "2026-08-23T19:39:05Z")
Hi,
I think I may have found the cause of this issue, or at least a closely related Patreon API v2 sync issue.
I have a Discourse instance using the Patreon integration with API v2. Existing Patreon users continue to be assigned correctly to the `patrons` group, but a new paying member was not added to the group, even after manually running **Update Patreon Data**. The sync completed successfully and the email address in Patreon exactly matched the user’s Discourse email.
With `patreon_verbose_log` enabled, the sync reports:
```plaintext
Patreon sync: found 4 rewards/tiers across 1 campaigns
Patreon sync complete: 1968 pledges, 0 users synced
```
I then inspected the API response used by `ApiVersion::V2`.
For the first page of 1,000 members:
```plaintext
Members in data: 1000
Included total: 1004
Included users: 1000
Keys for first included user: ["full_name"]
Included users with email: 0
```
However, the `member` objects themselves contain the email:
```plaintext
Members: 1000
Keys for first member:
["currently_entitled_amount_cents", "email", "full_name",
"last_charge_date", "last_charge_status", "patron_status"]
Members with email: 928
```
Looking at `plugins/discourse-patreon/lib/api_version/v2.rb`, `MEMBER_FIELDS` explicitly requests `email`, but `V2.extract` only populates the `users` hash from the related `user` objects in `included`:
```plaintext
(member_data["included"] || []).each do |entry|
if entry["type"] == "user" && entry["attributes"]["email"].present?
users[entry["id"]] = entry["attributes"]["email"].downcase
end
end
```
It does not appear to use `entry["attributes"]["email"]` from the `member` objects, even though that is where Patreon is returning the email in my API response.
This seems to explain why the sync successfully retrieves all 1,968 pledges but reports `0 users synced`.
It also explains why existing Patreon/Discourse associations can continue working while new members cannot be matched by email: existing users may already have their `patreon_id` stored in `user_custom_fields`, whereas a new member needs the Patreon ID ↔ email association to be established.
Would it make sense for `V2.extract` to populate `users` directly while processing each member, for example:
```plaintext
patron_id = entry["relationships"]["user"]["data"]["id"]
attrs = entry["attributes"]
if attrs["email"].present?
users[patron_id] = attrs["email"].downcase
end
```
while retaining the current `included` processing as a fallback?