Notify Users of Payment Errors

[therabidbanana]

My credit card apparently failed at some point, but I got no notification about it.

[chadwhitacre]

+1

This actually happened to me today as well and I had the same thought. I suppose the best way to do this would be to depend on having an email address (#89).

[chadwhitacre]

Implicit +1 from @cjdelisle. I had to track him down manually via IRC when his payout failed.

[aljosa]

same problem here, i've just noticed that no money was taken from my card but this info is only available on https://www.gittip.com//history/ page.

[mvdkleijn]

Make having a valid email address mandatory when adding a credit card. Then upon failure, send an email. Optionally send an email when charging the card based on user preference settings.

[chadwhitacre]

I agree that valid email should be required in order to either pay or be paid.

[seanlinsley]

+1000 from me

IIRC, OAuth endpoints don't provide the user's email address, so an option might be to do what I've seen other websites do: upon successful account creation, immediately prompt the user for an email address. On that form it would also be good to describe exactly what sort of emails to expect.

While we're at it, maybe it would be a good thing to have an (unchecked) checkbox so the user can easily sign up for the Gittip mailing list? Maybe that's a bit too much...

[seanlinsley]

Ah, it looks like GitHub allows email scraping but Twitter doesn't. I can't seem to find any reference for Bitbucket, so I'm going to assume they don't allow it.

If I were to have my way, I'd disable (or provide a mechanism for users to disable) authentication via other services. Instead you'd log in via Persona (try this quick demo), which is entirely dependent on your email account, and then use OAuth for other services merely to prove that you own the given account.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @jacobian in IRC

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @olivierlacan over at #915 (comment).

[sigmavirus24]

+1 from @esacteksab on Twitter

[mlncn]

+1 And note my situation was i had never gotten around to connecting a credit card, because i wanted Dwolla (still do! #65) and even when i log in to gittip.com there is no notice on the site that there was no way to pay the people i was gittipping (a specific case of this was briefly considered in #74). It was just a nagging memory and awareness that i hadn't seen any charges on my bank account that got me to go look, and find the little x next to credit card in the connected accounts. So i'm saying a part of this solution should be a clear error shown to users when logged in if they have pledges that aren't going through. Maybe that can be split off and implemented quickly without concern for e-mail addresses?

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @dcwalk at #2372 (comment).

[chadwhitacre]

So i'm saying a part of this solution should be a clear error shown to users when logged in if they have pledges that aren't going through. Maybe that can be split off and implemented quickly without concern for e-mail addresses?

@mlncn I've added a +1 for you to #1746.

[patcon]

Anonymous +1 from support
http://gittip.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/536

[Changaco]

Closing in favor of #1746.