Yet more on the Paypal subscription bug

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Edge100x
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Yet more on the Paypal subscription bug

Post by Edge100x »

We'd hoped that this issue had been put to bed earlier this month, but this morning the Paypal subscription bug reared its ugly head again. All of the old subscriptions that we'd been told at the beginning of May had been invalid -- the ones from the end of April and beginning of May that nobody could even find in Paypal's history screens -- spontaneously appeared and paid us without warning this morning. As a result, we had a very busy morning dealing with understandably annoyed customers and canceling all the bad subscriptions while handling thousands of dollars worth of refunds.

With the cancellations made, and Paypal's assurances that there are no remaining bugs in their subscription system, we do not expect further problems with this or more unexpected payments. What we do expect is to be adding a different payment processor in June.

If you are having a payment problem that we didn't already catch, please contact us ASAP through email so that we can check it out.

Added on June 2:

We've been running into even more Paypal bugs since Paypal claimed it fixed this one with subscriptions in May. Most disturbing are these three confirmed problems:

- A bug that makes any subscription impossible to find and cancel (as before) if it is supposed to make an immediate payment and that payment bounces
- A bug that prevents us from receiving notification of certain payments that are made (and shows incomplete information for those payments in the Paypal history)
- A bug that results in customers having to unnecessarily "verify" their Paypal accounts and then tries to force them into paying with an e-check (something that we strongly discourage at this point because of the potential for bounced check fees if Paypal inappropriately tries to withdraw money, along with a lack of protection if they fraudulently charge the account)

The Paypal history function also has a bug that's annoying but not crippling -- with repeated searches, it mangles the search results so that we have to retry multiple times to get the correct ones.

Coupled with notoriously poor customer service and a refusal by Paypal to properly compensate us for the significant losses they've caused, these new bugs are making Paypal an extremely troublesome option for us, and we greatly look forward to moving on. It is very sad how much Paypal has declined in quality since April.
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Re: Yet more on the Paypal subscription bug

Post by Dog_Pound »

If you are moving away from Paypal, will you be providing a service to allow direct donations to a particular server like some other server providers do? Right now, I use a paypal account were members can donate directly and the funds sit and wait for your next invoice. If there is no capacity for this in future it means me taking funds into my own hands and paying you through whatever means you've come up with. Something I really did not want to do as I want all donations fully accounted for and stored for clan expenses.
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Edge100x
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Re: Yet more on the Paypal subscription bug

Post by Edge100x »

Yes, we are working on providing this feature as part of the new payment system.
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