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Under review

Recurring Credit Card Subscriptions / Replacement for PGP Email Option

Kevin M. Cox 9 years ago in BLOX CMS • updated by Christine Masters 9 years ago • 5

As I’m sure you all saw in the update last month, Town News will be disabling the use of PGP encrypted email to capture credit card numbers sometime soon.


We had been using this feature very successfully to capture credit card numbers for entry into Circulation Pro for recurring (Easy Pay) subscriptions.


How are the rest of y’all handling recurring subscriptions?


For those who were using PGP email through Town News forms what is your plan for a replacement?


There were several suggestions in the notice from Town News, but redirecting users to a third-party site to enter their payment information is exactly the type of thing we train consumers to watch out for to avoid being scammed.


Thanks for any and all suggestions and discussion!

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Security update: PGP encryption with BLOX CMS

You're receiving this message because your email address is used on a BLOX CMS form using PGP encryption.

Due to heightened security standards, TownNews.com will be changing the functionality of PGP encryption on BLOX CMS. When this change takes effect, credit card numbers will no longer be transmissible via email using TownNews.com systems and resources. This applies to both unencrypted and PGP-encrypted email messages. This software upgrade will occur in the very near future, sometime on or after January 1, 2016.

This update is necessary to ensure that we and our customers maintain Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance. PCI compliance is a strict set of standards that any organization accepting credit card transactions must meet. These measures will strengthen security and help safeguard our clients from the potential negative impacts of PCI non-compliance.

If you have BLOX CMS forms that currently accept credit card information, there are a variety of alternatives:

  • Remove credit card fields from your forms and replace them with a message informing customers that you will contact them via phone to complete the transaction. We can assist you with this change.
  • Use a payment handler such as Verisign or Authorize.net, which will allow forms to accept credit card transactions. Please note that use of 3rd-party payment handlers does incur a setup charge, along with monthly and per transaction charges from these companies. We can assist you with this change.
  • Accept credit card transactions via a 3rd-party online service dedicated to hosting PGP-encrypted forms (TownNews.com does not endorse or have a relationship with these companies). Options include, but are not limited to:

It's possible that you received this message in error, perhaps due to a form existing with PGP email (but disabled), or a form with both PGP enabled and a regular payment handler.

You may receive additional notifications for other TownNews.com products affected by changes to PGP and online credit card processing as we continually review and enhance our security procedures.

We apologize for any inconvenience this necessary security upgrade may cause. It is our goal to make this process as painless as possible for our customers.

We sincerely appreciate your business and look forward to serving you in the future. Please call our support team at 800-293-9576 if you have specific questions or concerns.

Under review
Rich Griffin | Product Manager (Product Manager) 9 years ago

Based on your specific situation, I would recommend looking at our MediaSpan Circulation Pro integration. Instead of copying and pasting credit card numbers manually, and then integration with via a CSV service, we would actually pass the purchasing and authentication process directly to Circulation Pro, where everything can be handled there.


This integration provides a "real-time" purchase workflow for your users and would allow users to purchase directly in the Circ-Pro portal negating the need for manually creating the users on the Circulation Pro side of things.

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There are fees for this integration (on TownNews and Mediaspan sides), but I think there is great value both in time saved four your staff and in the real-time Single sign on integration for you users.

Kevin M. Cox 9 years ago

Rich, I agree that the integration would bring many benefits beyond just this one scenario.


Unfortunately the last time we priced it out it would be over $5,000 to get things going plus a monthly recurring fee.


That is a tough pill to swallow to replace functionality that has previously been free and is why I'm looking to hear what other papers are doing.

Christine Masters 9 years ago

Just for clarification, I assume that $5,000 is mostly for a MediaSpan plugin? Because our integration certainly doesn't cost that much.

Kevin M. Cox 9 years ago

That is correct. For on-premise Circulation Pro customers there is a large fee to install their side of the integration. (This component is included in the monthly fee for SaaS Hosted Circulation Pro installs.)


As a refresher, what is the cost for y'alls side of the equation?

Christine Masters 9 years ago

I can have your sales person contact you with more information on the pricing.


But yeah, I can see how you may not have enough transactions to warrant an upgrade from your circ vendor. If you don't get more than 1 or 2 transactions per week, why not just have the form say, "We will call to confirm your information and complete the transaction." Then you get their credit card over the phone.


If you get more than that, you can always embed the 3rd party form into a secure BLOX page with your header and footer - it will be secure and most users will be unable to tell it is a 3rd party service.

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