Author Topic: Why is mailing address needed for donation?  (Read 2484 times)

Offline yarond

  • Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2
Why is mailing address needed for donation?
« on: November 04, 2008, 01:58:52 am »
I really like Alt.Binz, and have been trying it for a while now.
It's been useful enough that I decided to come and donate, despite the inconvenience (I didn't encounter many places where you are forced to create a user account just in order to be able to donate money. And I did donate to quite a lot of free software that I frequently use).

But I have an issue with the donation process. The Paypal form includes my mailing/shipping address. Which is obviously not necessary, since I won't be getting anything by mail.

It's not that my address is incredibly secret, but I don't see a need to share more private/personal info than necessary. When I need something physically shipped, an address is necessary. When not, it isn't.

Paypal allows to set a form that will not pass the mailing address. I've seen it, and used it, plenty of times. Pretty much every single time I used paypal for something that didn't require shipping, actually. But in this case the form doesn't use their "no_shipping" field, so it includes my address, and doesn't allow me not to send it. (And since the donation form here uses the encrypted form, I can't just add the field myself)

Is there a particular, good, reason why a physical address is necessary in order to accept a donation? Can I expect this to be fixed?

Offline Rdl

  • Administrator
  • *****
  • Posts: 4050
Re: Why is mailing address needed for donation?
« Reply #1 on: November 04, 2008, 07:30:42 pm »
I really like Alt.Binz, and have been trying it for a while now.
It's been useful enough that I decided to come and donate, despite the inconvenience (I didn't encounter many places where you are forced to create a user account just in order to be able to donate money. And I did donate to quite a lot of free software that I frequently use).

But I have an issue with the donation process. The Paypal form includes my mailing/shipping address. Which is obviously not necessary, since I won't be getting anything by mail.

It's not that my address is incredibly secret, but I don't see a need to share more private/personal info than necessary. When I need something physically shipped, an address is necessary. When not, it isn't.

Paypal allows to set a form that will not pass the mailing address. I've seen it, and used it, plenty of times. Pretty much every single time I used paypal for something that didn't require shipping, actually. But in this case the form doesn't use their "no_shipping" field, so it includes my address, and doesn't allow me not to send it. (And since the donation form here uses the encrypted form, I can't just add the field myself)

Is there a particular, good, reason why a physical address is necessary in order to accept a donation? Can I expect this to be fixed?
Try donate button from the program. It's not encrypted. You'll see there that there is no shipping enabled but it still displays shipping address.

Offline yarond

  • Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2
Re: Why is mailing address needed for donation?
« Reply #2 on: November 05, 2008, 12:25:36 am »
Quote
Try donate button from the program. It's not encrypted. You'll see there that there is no shipping enabled but it still displays shipping address.
Yes, that's true. It sends the no_shipping=1 parameter, and Paypal still adds the address.

This is probably something set up somewhere on the account used to receive money for Alt.Binz . I checked several other places using Paypal for donations, and so far whenever the no_shipping=1 value was sent, Paypal did not add the shipping address.
So while it's probably not enough now to change something on the form, I suppose there's something to change in the account. My own Paypal account isn't a merchant account, and I never used it to receive money, so I wouldn't know where to look.

If you can take a look into this (as I verified it is still quite possible to set a donation not to include an address) that would be great.
Alternately, I don't mind simply using the "Send Money" feature in Paypal to the email address specified in the program, if it's still correct (alt binz at gmail . com).