I’m unable to activate my API Key

Superfly uses a very popular and successful WooCommerce plugin to handle licensing on our products. It works profoundly well. Not only for us here at Superfly, but for quite a large number of other product vendors.

Unfortunately, no one plugin can handle every website scenario. Rare issues occur due to complications that can’t be addressed by a plugin, including how your site and/or hosting is set up.

If you are experiencing an error activating your license key for a Superfly product, please read on!

Here are some suggestions you can try before you submit a support ticket:

  1. If you purchased a “Hobbyist” license, be sure you’ve not activated your license on more than 2 sites simultaneously. You can visit your Superfly “My Account” area and disable a site you that are not working on or need a license for. This will disable an “instance ID” for an incorrect site that you need for a current site.

    If you purchased a “Hardcore” license with unlimited installed, this should not be an issue.

  2. You might see an error message such as “The API Key could not be deactivated. Use the API Key Deactivation tab to manually deactivate the API Key before activating a new API Key.

    If you are using a Superfly plugin, please deactivate and then activate the plugin. If you are using a Superfly child theme, change the theme to another one, then change back to your Superfly child theme. 

    In both of these instances, the local data sent to our API manager is reset, and the unique “Instance ID” will change (hopefully in a way that makes the activation work).

    At that point, go to your theme/plugin settings page and enter the API key to reactivate.

  3. Sometimes, when your API key fails to activate, it’s due to your hosting provider’s server configuration not allowing your site to reach out and check the status of your license. Contact your hosting provider and have them check the error logs of your site to see if “outgoing curl requests” are disabled. Enabling these requests will correct the issue many times.
  4. You are using the wrong email address. For example, you might get an “Invalid API License Key. Login to your My Account page to find a valid API License Key.” message.

    This can be caused when you have used more than one email address in your interaction with Superfly. Your API License email is the email address you used when you created your Superfly account, not necessarily the email address you used for this order.

    When inputting your API Email on the “**Product Name ** API Key Activation” page, be sure to put in the email address you used when creating your Superfly account (your login email address, which is normally the email you used when placing your very first order).

  5. If you get an error message such as “Connection failed to the License Key API server. Try again later.” the problem could be one of these:

    There may be a problem with the client server preventing outgoing requests. (See note about curl above.)

    Your site may be under attack, such as a DDOS (distributed denial of service).

    These are just possible scenarios, but here are a few things you can try:

    Disable CloudFlare, or other CDNs, all firewall and caching software.

    In the case of a DDOS, you may need to carefully add CloudFlare, or some other firewall service. This could make things worse if you’re not sure how to implement a firewall, so get help if some things are not working as expected.

When none of the above works:

We will need to have FTP access to your site in case we need to modify files. Any modifications done will have zero effect on your site other than to solve the problem.

For FTP access, you can get this information from your hosting company. Here is what we will need:

– Connection protocol (for example: FTP, SFTP or TLS implicit/explicit)
– FTP/SFTP address (usually an IP address or a url that looks something like ftp://myftpdomain.com, but could be different)
– Port number (usually port 21 for FTP, port 2222 for SFTP, or port 990 for implicit, but could be anything)
– FTP Username
– FTP Password
– FTP Root directory

Once we successfully connect to your site via FTP, we will be adding a small, lightweight plugin to your site that will allow us to do some code tracing. It will have practically no impact on your site while we are testing. We will also be deactivating and then deleting the plugin once we are done.

If you created temporary/custom WP admin and/or FTP accounts for us (which we highly recommend), then you will be able to delete those accounts as well.

While we are working on this, please be sure to keep in mind that your product will continue working just fine even with the license key not activated. We’ve made sure to keep it that way so that your productivity is not reduced or stopped. We understand that the API nag messages are rather annoying, so we’ll do the best we can to get this resolved for you as quickly as possible.