My 2 cents:

2 years ago I bought a 3-month membership on some 3D stuff website, paid with paypal - no problems.

A year ago I tried to buy the same sort of membership - the payment was declined because of the reason mentioned in the OP.
I e-mailed paypal asking wtf. I was told that I should contact the owner of the site I was trying to get the membership rather than paypal because it was the owner/moderator w/e who decided on how transactions were accepted.
I e-mailed them and they confirmed what paypal consultant had said.
They (not paypal) changed the way you could pay for the membership. Only linked cards were allowed.

As someone above said - linked credit cards are necessary when you buy something which requires regular fees. If you run out of your paypal money, it will suck from your credit card.
But that's not paypal's choice - you as a web master decides which payments are accepted.

I wanted to donate for Subsim a few month ago and hit the same problem, Credit Card required. Paypal is funny sometimes...

:D Ahhh! Didn't I say its the NSA?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-922430.html

That's why they want everybody's credit cards, and want everybody using credit cards. Easier to track. :up:

If you are a tourist or visitor to the US, you must even file in your credit card data that you n ever used for transaction with the Us, and will not take with you and thus do not use there. One of the many, many personal data they demand from you when you travel into the US. If you get send to prison by a German court, far less personal data about you are recorded in files, than when you visit the US.

Matti does not wish to deal with the paypal issue any longer. I cannot criticise him for that, why should he care for it at all if it is my business. So, no donations from me. He used his paypal this morning, btw, for a direct debiting process like usual, and it worked. Without a credit card filed into his account.

Neal, you may want to check your paypal procedure settings. That the direct debit processing is not allowed from here to your paypal account definitely is no general paypal policy setting (though it spreads) affecting all paypal transactions, but affects only certain types and cases, it must be something related to your account therefore.

Ah?! Hear hear.

Am not sure it could matter, but perhaps this was caused by a donation to Subsim being changed to a "subscription" which automatically gets billed annually unless you cancel it.

Could this be the cause?

Does subsim have snail mail?

Someone charged two apple computers to my visa ... but thank god I didn't have enough funds to cover them :o

Yup,

Neal Stevens, Subsim
5108 Woodville Lane
Pearland, TX 77584

this is the cause (as I explained in my post above) but I bet we will have at least 4-5 more people blaming paypal rather than subsim for not being able to donate.

I will have to check with Paypal, if that is the case, I can add a non-subscription button too. The subscription option notifies the user before renewing the subscription, so it can be cancelled easily at any time.

I could never remember the address. But I can drive there from memory.
:haha:

Last year around Easter I did a drive by scowling.

http://www.emofaces.com/png/200/emoticons/scowling.png

I'm sending my donation out via snail mail.

:salute:

I just tried it again to check that out, by now I have my friends paypal data in the back of my head :D, but I find no option to choose between donation and subscription ?! Trying to complete the paypal debiting process again failed: "no debit transactions possible, please link a credit card to your paypal account" (translated from the German).

A banking or email provider, or whatever it is, named snail mail is unknown to me, could find no info on it. And I have no intention to buy or subscribe into just another such service.

It's either paypal, or Visa, but not Visa via paypal, and no third transaction service. What is good enough for so many other shops and service providers, certainly should be good enough for Subsim, too. If not, I fold. It's not as if my money is begging me to leave my purse.

Snail Mail is a term commonly used for surface/letter post :03:

Oh, my fault.

Money in letters is a no go. Tests with the German mail in 2011 showed that up to one third of such envelopes disappeared.

I am a big fan of cash payment. But only from hand to hand.

Yeah, the reason I went with "subscription" is because the word has SUB in it.

No, not really, it is because the vBulletin forum system works with the Paypal subscription tools to automatically enable the user ranks and forum access for me.

its always best to put it inside a sheet of paper folded 3 times so you cant see money through the envelope, I never just stick it in by itself or your right it gets nicked

That goes without saying. BTW, the tests showed (they were even on TV) that it is not about seeing, but feeling it with fingertips, and fingernails (!)

Worked with a mail center in the early 90s myself, during university. It was a not-spoken-about open secret that the disappearance rates with parcels also were much higher than what they let the public know. No wonder, there was almost zero security back then, everybody could stroll onto the perimeter, act as if he belonged there,. picked up a parcel, and walk out. Nobody would have asked you. With parcel services now being delegated to sub-contractors by most if not all parcel deliverers, it probably has not become better.


Neal,
if you get your paypal thing fixed, or set up a credit card option, set up a big flashing post announcing it in GT, and I'm sure you will be able to collect some more coins within short time - and mine as well, certainly. Until then, I now let it rest.

Ok, Sky, I have a special button for you :shucks:

Click here and enter any amount you wish.

That is not a subscription, just a plain donation form. Thanks!

Special button for a special person :haha:

No problems here making a donation to Subsim using Paypal. It worked just fine!