[NTLK] Followup: Looking for people willing to donate one cent to pda-soft.de

Frank Gruendel newtontalk at pda-soft.de
Wed Nov 17 18:11:27 EST 2010


> That's weird. When I clicked on the spanish version it took me back to the
> thank you page correctly...

Excellent news. You probably came after I changed a fair amount of things. I think I might have
found the cause of the problem. It was probably the fact that my mind mostly thinks straight instead
of in weird loops and circles like PayPal's.

Imagine you are creating a donate button. On the creation form PayPal asks you questions like "are
customers allowed to add their own amount", "can customers add a text note" or "do you want your
customers to be taken to a custom thank you page when they finish checkout". After answering all
these questions and clicking on the "Create button", you are presented with a chunk of HTML code you
are supposed to copy and paste into your page, after which they ensure you you will be all set.

Would you believe that in some way or other everything you just entered on this form will somehow be
encoded in the HTML they just created for you? I, for one, did.

But it seems that for this to work AT ALL, you have to enable this type of forwarding in your
seller's preferences. Since you must be logged in to create a donate button, they know your seller's
prefs while you type. Would you think that it might be a good idea to notify you of an ambiguity if
forwarding is turned off in your seller's prefs while you enter a forwarding url in the button
creation form?

Another amazingly stupid way to handle things is the fact is that if you DO enable forwarding in
your seller's prefs, you must add a default URL. You can (as I found out later) override this
default in your HTML code, but you can only replace it with a different URL. You cannot inhibit
forwarding once you turned it on in your seller's prefs.

Would you believe that after enabling forwarding and giving a default url, donators would be taken
to this url? I, for one, did. But this isn't so. You have to read a 4MB pdf first to find there's a
"return" property you can (and must) use in your HTML that will override the default url set in your
seller's prefs. If it isn't there, the default doesn't appear to kick in. Why the heck are they
asking for this info on their creation form if they do not add it to the html they create?

Boy, how stupid can a user interface be. I sometimes wish my mind was more weird. Most people seem
to be able to figure this out at the first attempt, otherwise Paypal would have probably changed it
by now.

I strongly hope that the thank you pages will now work in all three languages. At least in Spanish
they seem to be OK now.

Thanks

Frank

-- Newton software and hardware at http://www.pda-soft.de




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