Can't Donate with Netsurf or OBrowser

Got no response in another thread in this Bounties sub-forum and so I’ll have another go here.

Both Netsurf and OBrowser fail when I try to donate to a bounty. I get to the first Paypal page, but no further – nothing happens after entering the amount of my donation and opt to pay by card. I don’t even get to this page with Netsurf, just a page saying “please wait”, with or without javascript enabled. Is ROOL aware of this?

I didn’t have this problem previously.
A way round this is for ROOL to allow donations by bank transfer.

I get stuck at “Please wait” in Safari on Mac with JavaScript disabled, so that’ll explain why NetSurf doesn’t get past there. I’m not sure about OBrowser; it must have better JS support than NetSurf but perhaps it still isn’t quite enough.

With that said, ROOL shouldn’t be “forcing” use of a site that doesn’t work in any mainstream RISC OS browser.

I just remembered that I’ve seen something in the news recently about eBay switching from PayPal to Adyen (which I’d never heard of until now). Adyen’s home page works without JavaScript, although I have no idea whether it’s possible to complete a payment (or whether it’s practical for ROOL for that matter!)

David,
ROOL do accept payment by bank transfer (Faster Payments) for items that they sell. Whether it’s possible to do donations using the same bank details, I don’t know, I’ve never tried.

HTH

I agree with Chris that ROOL should ensure that the payment system they use works with a mainstream RISC OS browser. Anybody tried with the RISC OS version of Firefox?
I have a standing order set up to pay ROOL monthly, but I don’t know how this could work for bounties as a reference would need to be given for the particular bounty.
I notice that the “debug USB stack step 2” has been stuck at 16 donations for some time. I wonder why?

Standing orders/recurring payments were discussed on another thread recently and it transpires those donations are totted up at the end of the year and added to the RISC OS General bounty. Sure enough, you can now see the total for 2017 has retrospectively leaped from £550 to £2905.

I have just tried donating with the RISC OS version of Firefox (thanks to Peter Naulls) to answer my own question, and it also fails at the PayPal “please wait” page. This is with FF version 2.0.0.21 (Aug 2009 – R8) on an ARMX6.

Can we keep this issue live until ROOL does something?

And with Otter Browser?

Just tried with Otter Browser unsuccessfully. I got as far as a page where I entered my donation, but clicking on “donate” or “donate with card” resulted in an almost empty PayPal page, certainly nothing relevant to proceed. I did try enabling and disabling Javascript at various points and this sometimes got me a new page, but I was going round in circles. Sometimes I had to do a Catchpa.

resulted in an almost empty PayPal page

I have had to do a double take with paypal a few times on linux lately.
Can you simply login to your Paypal account on it’s own?
When I wget that Paypal login the source shows no-javascript, but it knows what country I have retrieved from, so who knows what they might change to suit your browser.
If you look at the source from the rool page that has the paypal button, you can see the email address and descriptions of the bounty.
Including that information manually at your (logged in) paypal should get your money to the desired place.
You can send money to another Paypal registered person via their email address.
I imagine that information would go with you via a cookie when going to Paypal when all is working.
If not, how else?

Yes, I managed to login to my PayPal account. I haven’t tried your other suggestions. I stopped using my PayPal account some years ago after PayPal passed users data to the US government, and so on the PayPal page I opt to pay by card. This used to work on Netsurf, but not now when you try to donate via ROOL. This latest fiasco is another reason to avoid PayPal.

This latest fiasco is another reason to avoid PayPal.

Overseas people can only use paypal or credit card, if you are in the UK you should keep on trying to get a direct debit method going. There are fees on both paypal and credit cards. Actually I cant imagine you’d want the monthly payment option any other way. Maybe the account details are in the rool page for monthly payments. As with the Paypal, you’d want to include a reference field to direct your payment to the selected bounty.
Edit: Actually direct debit is a possibility from NZ, we are getting 4 million visitors a year and it is just a matter of selling a van or offering the fair currency rate to exchange, and the UK person could do a direct debit on line.

I managed to login to Paypal with Netsurf, but the display is a bit cock-eyed and I failed to select from my two accounts/credit cards. I have to have one for New Zealand and for Australia (while there)
On the brighter side !Netsurf is handling these rool forum posts effortlessly at the moment (3.8 DEV CI#4317)

I already have a monthly standing order paid into their bank account for the “general” bounty in addition to the original credit card monthly payment made via ROOL’s PayPal account. I want to get the latter cancelled and increase the monthly S.O. by the same amount, but can’t see how to do it on my bank’s website. Maybe I cancel it from ROOL’s website.
I agree, that to donate to a specific bounty by transfer into ROOL’s account, a reference to that bounty is the way to go; but before doing that I would like to hear from ROOL that it will go to that bounty and not into “General”.
As I have said earlier, I can login to my PayPal account.

Surely they wouldn’t have a separate account for each category.
One way to try it might be to donate a small uneven amount and watch for the change over the next few days.

I just tried a couple of things.

1. I went to RISC OS General 2018 and used the monthly “Buy Now” button. I was redirected to Pay Pal, signed in, got the confirmation link, clicked on Cancel & was redirected back to ROOL correctly.
2. I went to RISC OS General 2018 – Make A Donation and used the “Donate” button. I got a fancy CSS and JS-heavy page where I could enter the donation amount, then the flow was much the same as the above after that.

It all worked. Safari, OS X 10.13.3, i.e. a modern browser. Please do bear in mind that ROOL has no control over the CSS or JavaScript choices that PayPal make. When you click on one of those orange buttons, after that it is out of our hands and 100% in theirs.

If you aren’t able to get PayPal to work, please can you:

• Describe the exact OS and OS version, browser and browser version to the best of your ability
• Describe clearly what steps you took and where you think things went wrong

David – you say that you have a standing order plus a PayPal monthly payment and you want to cancel the latter, i.e., cancel the PayPal payment. You say you can log in to your PayPal account. So:

• Log in
• Click on the “cog” icon in the blue navigation bar, top right of screen
• Click on the “PAYMENTS” tab in the blue navigation bar, top centre-left
• Click on the “Manage pre-approved payments” button.

On other points:

I get stuck at “Please wait” in Safari on Mac with JavaScript disabled

PayPal has required JavaScript for many, many years now.

ROOL shouldn’t be “forcing” use of a site that doesn’t work in any mainstream RISC OS browser

Unfortunately we are not aware of any readily available international payment gateways that work reliably without JavaScript. The RISC OS community is generally too small to support a web browser that is able to keep pace with the rapid rate of evolution in web technologies and their many, varied and often bizarre uses on third party web sites.

Adyen

They’re popular right now but don’t have the history of PayPal, and they charge numerous fees for each transaction. I’m unable to find an example site to check if they work without JS, but their main web site only partially works. It’s got graceful degradation in a lot of areas but some images fail to load because, I guess, they must be on some sort of JS delay hook or similar.

“debug USB stack step 2” has been stuck at 16 donations

The 16th was registered on Jan 26 2018. We had a few in December 2017. But largely, this is a quiet bounty. Not many donations.

This latest fiasco is another reason to avoid PayPal.

PayPal are controversial but from our side they’re flexible, very cheap, proven and internationally available. But yeah, they don’t code towards non-JavaScript clients. Does anyone these days? The state of modern software development is lamentable, with web sites no exception. Little ROOL can’t fight that! So all we can recommend is to use a “mainstream browser” for donations, or send us e-mail:info@riscosopen.org and ask for help. Yes this isn’t great, it’d be much nicer if there were a RISC OS native solution, but sometimes you have to pick your battles and fighting a JavaScript battle with the entire payment processing world isn’t really something we can taken on.

This all said, OBrowser is a really awesome development and we can keep our fingers crossed that they can do a decent job of keeping up with PayPal or other payment processor changes. If we can find one that’s easier to integrate with, I’m all ears…

Oops, one thing I almost missed:

Surely they wouldn’t have a separate account for each category.

Correct. So yeah, if you have any concerns about bank transfers and donation targeting, please do e-mail us:info@riscosopen.org and we’ll do our best to provide warm fuzzies that things will go to the right place ;-)

Yes, I worked out that I could cancel the credit card donation by going into my PayPal account and did so. So my monthly donation into “General” will now be totally by bank transfer now.

Surely, ROOL could give the option of bank transfer for a specific bounty by giving ROOL’s account details on the bounty donations page and ask the donor to include in the reference both the name of the specific bounty and donor’s name. The bounty name needs to be an abbreviation as there is a limit on the number of characters that banks allow in a reference. It may be better to have a code number for each bounty so that there is room for the donor’s name.
I pay lots of bills to gardeners, cleaners etc. by bank transfer giving their reference or including my name as reference. So, if service firms can do it, so can ROOL.

So, if service firms can do it, so can ROOL.

I suspect that said “service firms” are factoring the cost of collecting payment (in terms of their admin time) into the price that they charge you. ROOL, on the other hand, have limited resource in terms of people to do admin, and are trying to put as much of the money as possible towards RISC OS development. They could do what you ask, but personally I’d prefer them to do something more useful with the time that would need to be spent on administrating such a system.

I’m struggling with this thread, to be honest. Surely the simple answer to the problem is “use Firefox/Chrome/Other Browser on Windows/MacOS/Linux”?

I’m struggling with this thread, to be honest. Surely the simple answer to the problem is “use Firefox/Chrome/Other Browser on Windows/MacOS/Linux”?

Maybe – but you are making the assumption that the user has such a machine – believe it or not some RISC OS users do not.

@Steve
Some firms that actually prefer to be paid by bank transfer, believe it or not, are quite small having a small number of customers. They give their bank details plus a reference. For example, a gardener I pay by bank transfer, for that’s what he most wants, is a ‘one man and a dog’ outfit (actually a young lad helps him) snd can hsve at most 40 customers (how many jobs can you get done once a fortnight?). Some larger small service businesses that I use also ask for payment by bank transfer. So I’m struggling with your comment. As I have said above, ROOL already accept my monthly psyment into the General bounty by bank transfer. All that is required in addition for a specific bounty is for the name, or code (see my previous post) of the bounty to be included in the reference. How can this cost ROOL more money than via PayPal? Does my existing monthly bank transfer cost ROOL anything and, if so, is it any more than what it was via PayPal from my credit card account?

Punter pays by bank transfer, giving a reference code that indicates a specific bounty. Rool downloads a bank statement as TSV, drops it into a spreadsheet. Easy-peasy to concoct a dsum() frunction in the sheet to total up how much dosh belongs to what bounty.