Patreon reward group users got wiped out

Support
1

Hey! On my small community Discourse integrated with Patreon, I have around 900 people and the majority of them are users who pledged, as the only way to access the forum is by doing so. I’m happily running the forum for around 7 months, but now I got a user complaint that they can’t access the forum. After looking, all* of the users are not assigned to the pledge groups that give them access.

I don’t know how many people were in the pledge groups before this, but my guess would be around 500. This number is now 40*. The number of people pledging on Patreon didn’t go down, the people who stayed simply don’t have access now as they were removed from the access groups. Additionally, it seems like most of the new users are not assigned appropriate access groups either, just a guess, I can’t be confident about this.
As for the random 40* people who stayed, I have no clue why, they don’t pledge more than others, they are just random users.

Why did this happen? Is this an issue on the Discourse plugin side or Patreon side? What can I do to address this issue?
Could this simply be a huge lag on Patreon API side and everything will go back to normal after a few days? If so, why did this happen at all?

Quick list of things I did and didn’t do:

  • Didn’t modify/add/remove pledges, especially not their pledge amount.
  • Didn’t modify/add/remove Discourse groups.
  • Didn’t modify Patreon plugin settings.
  • Rechecked if API keys are still valid.
  • Pressed the “Patreon Data & Sync Groups” button (never seems to do anything anyway)

I’m not going any deeper in fear of messing up anything beyond repair until I get some kind of assistance.

2

Not sure but perhaps @justin could take a look.

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4

24h Update: Groups are still as empty as they were, seems like nothing changed. The “40” number actually increased to “45”. It seems like new users who join get access (no idea if all), but all existing users, that are still pledged, don’t have access.

5

Advice: if you still have a backup from before this happened, set it apart to keep it from being rotated/deleted.

You can always restore it on a temporary server to retrieve a list of people who previously had access, in case you need it.

6

Thanks. I’m being hosted directly by Discourse, so it says backups are made every 12 hours. I would assume one is kept in a good state.

8

I was working with @TURBODRIVER privately – to summarize the issue: there are rate limits set by the plugin which were being exceeded. Increasing the rate limits fixed the issue.

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