Slight changes to Direct Debit payment method

Hi, As those of you on the "users" list may have seen, I've been making some necessary changes to our Direct Debit integration with GoCardless: https://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20170920.113352.8bfd6684.en.html On 31 October GoCardless are retiring the original API we integrated with in 2012 so I've had to make the changes necessary to move to their current "Pro" API. Sadly there aren't any really any new features to talk about, hence my delay in taking care of this. One thing I do need to mention is that the capped mandates of the legacy API are no longer supported. All Direct debit mandates set up through the legacy API were capped to the exact amount per time period for your recurring VPS bill, e.g. £10.79 per month, £29.64 per quarter, etc. In hindsight this was a bad idea as it caused problems as soon as anyone upgraded or tried to move their payment date earlier. An awkward consequence of this is that pre-existing Direct Debit mandates will still respect the caps set on them but there is no longer any way for us to query those caps. Whereas before we could tell that a charge might fail today but succeed tomorrow, and thus would be happy enough to wait until tomorrow to submit it, we now can't tell at all. We have to submit the charge and see if it fails. And if it does fail, we can't tell the difference between "too soon" and "too much". This is unfortunate because "too soon" is of course a temporary issue, but "too much" is a permanent one. I decided not to cancel everyone's Direct Debit mandates because this is still a relatively rare problem: it only becomes an issue if you upgrade your VPS or try to pay a one-off invoice, which then causes the cap to be exceeded the next time your scheduled payment tries to be charged. Instead I've decided that we will just catch the "cap exceeded" error and ask you to cancel and re-authorise on a case by case basis. To assist with that I've made it so you can cancel your own Direct Debit from the panel. I whinged some more about this here: http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2017/09/21/tricky-issues-when-upgrading-to… and wrote some more about it here: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Direct_Debit#Legacy_Integration As before you can fiddle with the Direct Debit stuff from the Billing section of the Panel: https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/billing/ It's been live and taking payments for about 5 days now, but if anyone has any issues with it of course do let me know. And I welcome anyone with a UK bank account to switch to it as it is still the best payment method. :) Speaking of which: there was some hope that we could start taking Direct Debits from customers with bank accounts in EUR and SEK, as the Pro API does supports that. It turns out though that this also requires BitFolk to have bank accounts in those currencies and to also bill in those currencies. That's not something that I want to do in the foreseeable future so instead I will work on doing recurring payments through Stripe (credit/debit cards). Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting