Since this is a recurring issue, people seem to have legitimate beefs with Paypal, and there are hundreds of other payment processing services, is there any chance we can get another option before we have to re-up next time?
Seriously, I don’t understand how Paypal can stay in business – they have all the power of a major bank, and none of the oversight. They regularly do crap like lock accounts for “investigation” for trivial and clearly fraudulent reasons, with no recourse or even ability to contact a person with the power to correct the problem.
Nothing short of a life-or-death circumstance could convince me to open another account with them, but I don’t want them getting any money off me, not even the transaction fees for processing my credit card. But I can’t vote with my wallet if I don’t have any options. The SDMB is the only thing left I have to pay via Paypal, and I wince every time I have to do it.
Is this credit card the same one you have registered with PayPal?
If that is the case the transaction will not work.
It has to be a card you do not have registered on PayPal.
In that situation you either have to de-register the card on PayPal or use PayPal to pay for your subscription.
If this is still a problem please contact me off the board at a more convenient time for you and let’s try walking you through the situation. Sorry you’re having problems.
I’m so sorry, I really don’t know what’s going on here but let’s see if we can get you through this.
Please contact me off the board and let’s see if we can find a time to walk you through this, figure something out. Or a gift subscription through someone else, maybe.
I hate to ask you a stupid question here but I will – are you entering the numbers all together without spaces? Some people put spaces between each block of numbers and that doesn’t work.
Is there any way you could send me a screen shot?
I’m so sorry you’re going through this and I don’t know why it’s happening.
When I change my country to Canada, there are no options to pay without creating an account. I tried IE9 and firefox, but both browsers display the same behaviour. The only options are ‘Pay with my PayPal account’ and ‘Create a PayPal account’.
It does enforce the whole username and password thing if you try to pay without entering one.
Are there any Members (Charter or otherwise) from outside the United States who has recently subscribed and done so without incident? Trying to figure out how large this problem is and if it is isolated or if it’s a lot of people and you all just gave up.
Please tell us about your subscription experiences.
I had trouble on April 4th (see up thread) but on April 7th after I used my PayPal account to pay, I went back because other people were having issues and the options on the screen were different. I don’t know how, but #2 below wasn’t the same and allowed you to pay without an account.
But now the options for Netherlands are:
Betalen met mijn Pay-pal rekening…log in op uw rekening om te betalan
(so, use your existing Pay-pay account to pay the bill)
Open een Pay-Pal rekening
en betaal met uw creditcard
(Open a Pay-Pal account and use your credit card)
If you click the second and scroll down you will see ‘Kies een Pay-Pal wachtwoord’ and ‘Voor uw wachtwoord opnieuw in’ - basically choose a Paypal password and fill it in again. From memory, if you leave these blank it won’t let you proceed.
Hope this helps (though I am already re-upped now).
OK, so I know I don’t play much here anymore, but I still pay for a membership for the few times a year I drop by (plus, I like supporting this place, even if I don’t frequent it), and I have a comment.
A two-day e-mail notice of an expiring membership isn’t enough.
This isn’t the first time it’s happened that I’ve gotten an e-mail and it’s been the weekend or whatnot and I don’t check e-mail for a couple of days, and then when I do, I’d better be prepared to re-up or I’m SOL; for example, this year I got the e-mail on 5/19 (Sunday) and was away and just checked my e-mail this morning (5/21), checked, and oh look at that, my membership expires TODAY.
Is there any way to send these auto notices out sooner?
Also, I see there has been renewal chatter about how to pay and such, but keep in mind there are some folks like us who won’t see that info. (Was there anything we absolutely needed to know before renewing?)
I know, I’m a pest, but I wanted to put this out there. Thanks for listening.
If we missed reupping in time because of board outages, can we still keep our charter membership? If so, can we pretend that’s what happened to me and not that I just forgot because my expiry date was my birthday? As much as it seems like setting the date that you have to do something as your birthday would be an excellent reminder, it’s actually a surefire way to guarantee that you will forget because you’ll be doing something birthday related instead. I know because I did the same stupid thing last year.
I downloaded Chrome today and it worked this time. Weird that there are issues with two of the most common browsers (although I didn’t check again IE and firefox. Maybe the issue has simply been fixed since last time I tried).
Is there anyone else out there that would like to retain their Charter Membership but is having technical or other difficulties? Let’s see if we can’t get you straightened out while it’s still $7.48 and starts getting into some real money.
