Hi! Long-time lurker here who feels she owes you $5 bucks for everything I’ve learned here! Apparently, though, you don’t really want my money.
When I click on ‘Subscribe’ in the menu bar, I get sent to the subscription page which explains the deal and at the bottom has the place to order a membership.
I click on the ‘Order’ button and I get sent to the Select Payment Page. This has a box with one prominent option - credit card - and a small text link below that says ‘Pay with Paypal.’
When I click on the big button that says “Order Using Credit Card,” I get sent to this page here, with the message:
“Invalid HTTP_REFERER. Please restart and use the Straight Dope Message Boards subscriptions page.”
Restarting hasn’t helped yet.
I’m using Win XP & Opera 7.23, all cookies all allowed (including for the moment 3rd party & illegal paths.)
"For security reasons, I check the HTTP_REFERER to make sure they are coming from our site. The HTTP_REFERER contains the last paged you viewed.
"She is using Opera. There is a setting under File -> Quick Preferences -> Enable Referrer Logging. If this setting is check off, Her HTTP_REFERER will always be blank. This will cause the “Invalid HTTP_REFERER. Please restart …” error.
“The simple solution is to have her turn on the Enable Referrer Logging for the subscription process and then turn it off when finished.”