Post Pay Counter

The best way to pay authors on WordPress

Fixed a Publisher Bonus issue with complex settings setups

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On March 2022, an issue in the Publisher Bonus addon was fixed. The major scenarios in which the issue would pop up are the following:

  1. Author A has personalized settings, with visits payment active. They write a post and send it for review.
    Author B, the reviewer, is set to receive a publisher bonus not only per publishing, but also with an extra bonus per words on the published posts. They publish author A’s post.
    Expected result: author B receives a publisher bonus flat fee, and an additional bonus based on the number of words of the published post.
    Actual result: author B receives a publisher bonus flat fee, but not additional bonus based on words number (at best, they would get a visits bonus).
  2. Author A writes a post and marks with a category that has special settings. The category is set to pay posts per visit.
    Author B, the reviewer, is set to receive a publisher bonus not only per publishing, but also with an extra bonus per words on the published posts. They publish author A’s post.
    Expected result: author B receives a publisher bonus flat fee, and an additional bonus based on the number of words of the published post.
    Actual result: author B receives a publisher bonus flat fee, but not additional bonus based on words number (at best, they would get a visits bonus).

In both cases, the issue is that the Publisher Bonus addon would calculate the additional bonus basing on the published post’s settings, rather than on the publisher’s own settings. This is not an issue in many circumstances, namely the setups in which published post settings are such that they have the same active payment criteria as the ones the publisher should get a bonus for (regardless of the payment rate). However, it is indeed an issue if publisher bonus is set to award a bonus on criteria that do not give value to the post itself (i.e. that are disabled payment criteria for the post). There are most likely some other scenarios in which the issue would show up, but the two above should give an idea of what would trigger it.

The issue should have not resulted in extra payments to authors – it should, in fact, have downsized their payments in the past. One easy way of noticing if you have been affected by the issue is to check if, with the Publisher Bonus versions from before March 2022, you see a non-zero due payment on editors even after having just marked them as paid. If, in the attempt of making that non-zero balance go away, you have made many payment transactions, you might see a negative balance with the new version. Our suggestion would then be to delete those payment records and re-mark the author as paid once again.

We apologize for the inconvenience and hope this has not affected too many of you too badly. Feel free to get in touch, both to ask for more details and in case you still see issues on your end.

How to define settings priority (user, category, role)

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Post Pay Counter allows quite a fine-grained settings control. By itself, the free version allows to assign different settings to different users, while addons allow to define special settings for given user roles, categories, and post types.

What happens, though, if you have multiple settings addons active? What settings will actually be used for a post that belongs to a category with special settings, written by an author belonging to a user role with special settings?

The default settings priority is defined as follows:

  1. User settings
  2. Category settings
  3. User role settings
  4. General settings

The ordering of points 1 and 4 cannot be altered: user settings will always have the highest priority, while general settings will always be the final fallback if nothing more special is found. However, Points 2 and 3 can be exchanged. This can be achieved with the following lines of code to be pasted in your theme functions.php (or any similar file).

To enforce the ordering above, with category settings having a higher priority over role settings, use this code:

# Category settings come first
add_action( 'PPC_URCS_settings_priority', function( $priority ) { return 8; } );
add_action( 'PPC_CCS_settings_priority', function( $priority ) { return 9; } );

To enforce the opposite ordering, with role settings having a higher priority over category settings, use this code:

# User role settings come first
add_action( 'PPC_URCS_settings_priority', function( $priority ) { return 9; } );
add_action( 'PPC_CCS_settings_priority', function( $priority ) { return 8; } );

(The Post Type Custom Settings addon is not compatible with the other addons. They can still be used all together, but in case of a settings clash, there is no way, as of now, to control the behavior.)