I attempted to make a recurring donation of $10 per month. The donation site said there was a problem and to try later. I then got a fraud alert text from my bank. I told my bank that this was a legitimate purchase and they responded to try again in 1-2 minutes. I did so. Again, the donation site said there was a problem. I then noticed that I got TWO order confirmations from Lightning Wire Labs, one for each attempt. I still have not seen the payment come through on my bank account. I am going to stop trying in order to avoid multiple transactions. Please advise on next steps. I would like to donate $10/month but if it continues to be this difficult, I may have to back out. If this ends up withdrawing $10/month TWICE, please delete one of the recurring transactions.
I emailed the above text to sales@lightningwirelabs.com and CC’d donate@ipfire.org. I then received FOUR automated replies, each with their own unique support ticket number! I’m not sure how four support tickets were opened for one issue, but it seems as if some things are broken in the donation system.
Lastly, I saw PayPal listed as a donation option, but when I got into the payment details section, I no longer saw PayPal as an option. That should be fixed too. Either don’t list it as an option, or allow it to be used.
My bank lifted the fraud alert and assured me I could make the transaction for my donation, but once again, after putting in my financial information, I am led to this page:
Also, I got another Order Confirmation email from Lightning Wire Labs, even though the order never got placed. Lastly, I confirmed that there is no option to pay with PayPal, even though it says there is on the Donate page:
Guys, I really want to donate and help the project, but this is becoming quite frustrating. You are more likely to get donations if the process is smooth and problem-free.
first of all, thank you for supporting our project!
I responded to your email to me and both transactions have been declined by your bank. Therefore we could not authorise the payment.
This is because you submitted the donation form a second time which will create a new transaction.
Correct, none of the attempts have been successful, so you won’t be charged.
I don’t think it is that difficult. We have payment processing like any other donation site or online shop. For processing your donation, we need a name, the country where you are from for calculating tax correctly, and some payment information. For credit card that would be the credit card number, expiry date and CVC2. That is all. A click of a button and a few seconds later the whole process is done.
If you have any ideas on how to make this easier, please let me know. There are many hoops that we have to jump through, partly because of legal requirements but more likely due to requirements by the credit card companies.
We aim to go with local business and we try to make the whole donation process as data protection friendly as possible.
Yes, this is correct. Your email went to the sales team (which does not deal with donations) and the billing team. Internally those are two different ticket systems so you got a response from each of them. However, that email was sent twice and therefore you got another set of two. I have closed the extra tickets.
PayPal is supported, but not for recurring transactions. This is because PayPal has not been doing enough against fraud in Europe and has therefore been banned to process recurring transactions. The option that we could do (and I am not sure if people would prefer that) is to send an invoice every month with a payment link for people to do the payment manually. I personally would not prefer that and rather use credit card, but there are some people for which we set this up.
As stated with a little bit more detail in my private email to you, it does not seem that the bank has solved this.
If you submit the donation form, you will create a new transaction. It is very similar to putting things into a shopping basket and then go to checkout. Once you clicked the submit button, you have submitted the intent to purchase that basket or here: to donate. We then will have to send you a dump of the entire transaction with all details about what you purchased before you make payment (this is a requirement by VISA and MasterCard). Then you will continue to make payment using one of the many payment options. The order will remain open for a little while as Europeans might use bank transfer which might take a few days to process. If a payment attempt fails, we won’t throw away the order. It will remain open until either payment has been received, or until we have decided to no longer wait for it. That is an automatic process actually.
I am open to suggestions to make this any easier, but if there is a problem where the payment cannot be authorised, there is not much we can do about it.
Thank you however for your feedback and I would suggest to try again after a little more time has passed for the bank to make changes to your card.
Thanks for your reply, Michael. I see where I messed up now.
In the US, State of residence is typically after City and before zip code. In the donation form, it is listed last, after Country and zip code. Somehow my browser auto-filled it with my name and because I could not tell that field was supposed to be for State once it was filled with something, I assumed it was a field intended to have my name in it. I actually wondered at the time why there was no state field. I assumed the information was derived from the zip code, which one can do in the States.
So right now the fields are defined in very faint text within each field, which then goes away when something is placed in that field.
move State of residence to a more traditional location right after City and just before Zip Code. I realize this is a US-centric request and may not correlate with European ways, but you asked.
define each field in separate text below each field, so even when the field is filled, you can clearly see what is supposed to be in that form field.
The donation page needs some updates anyways, so I will adopt your suggestion and fix it. However, the autofill feature from your browser should have done it right. It normally gets it right.
