I had got so used to not getting donations I never really thought to check and see if the button/link/service was still working. It wasn’t until my colleague informed me that it was not working since they attempted to do so. Very thoughtful, even though I pretty much don’t get any otherwise I was still curious as to what happened. So lets see, My site -> Blog -> donate:
Strange this was working before, it’s all plug-in driven. No settings changed, no plugins updated or api changes I’m aware of. So, I went to Google to see what I could find, funny how it’s always reddit to have info, other with the same results… such this guy, who at the time of this writing responded 12 hours ago to a comment asking if they resolved it, with a sad no. There’s also this one, with a response to simple “check your PayPal account settings”.
This lead me down an angry rabbit hole, so when you login you figure the donation button on the right side would be it:
Think again this simply leads to https://www.paypal.com/fundraiser/hub/
This simply leads to a marketing page about giving donations to other charities, not about managing your own incoming donation. I did eventually find the URL needed to manage them: https://www.paypal.com/donate/buttons/manage
However navigating to it when already logged made the browser just hang in place, eventually erroring out, I asked support via messaging but it was a an automod with auto responses and that didn’t help.
I found one other read post with the following response:
“It’s because you don’t have a charity business account and you didn’t get pre-approval from PayPal to accept donations. It’s in the AUP.”
Everything else if you google simple links to this: Accepting Donations | Donate Button | PayPal CA
Clicked get started… and
and then….
Oh c’mon…. This pro’s n cons, and ifs and buts are out of scope of this blog post. I picked Upgrade since I’m hoping to use it just for personal donations and nothing else is tied to this account right now, it says its free but I dunno…
Provide a business name, unno ZewwyCA (not sure if it supposed to be reg, I picked personal donations via the link above, so why is it pushing this on me…)
I can’t pick web hosting…. you can’t even read the whole line options under purpose of accounts… redic, sales? none, it costs me money to run this site.
After all this the dashboard changed a bit and there was something about accepting donations on the bottom right:
I tried my button again but same error of org not accepting donations… mhmm.
Let me check paypal… ughhh signed me out due to time out… log in… c’mon already….
This is brutal…. It basically “verified my residential details”… and it seemed to have removed my banking info… and even though some history still shows…
Clicking on the “view all” gives me nothing on the linked page…
Also, notice the warning about account holder verification… cool…
this sucks… number that just show you the last 2 digits, asking for occupation… jeez… then
This is a grind… why did they have to make these stupid changes!
Testing Finally!!! it works again…. jeees what a pain…. I still feel something might have broke, but I’ll fix those I guess when I feel it needs to be done. Hope this helps someone.