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

[Abraham Limpo]

Impressive and, unfortunately, completely believable...

As most pages run by a comitee, it is difficult to get these things right...
especially because there are no bug reports attended ;)

Cheers,
Abraham

2010/11/18 Frank Gruendel <newtontalk at pda-soft.de>

> > 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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