| LJ-only post for once! This is relevant to your PayPal. |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|07:59 pm] |
So!
I'm sure that some of you have seen the LJ holiday promotion going around, the one that only applies to year-long subscriptions for currently-not-Paid-accounts, and which only gets someone else $10 off the purchase of said subscription, forcing them to pay the difference. Great going, guys. Especially since something like 90% of the people I know who have Paid accounts have them because they were given to them by someone else.
However! This is not what I am here to warn you about. (Oh no, it gets better!)
So, having been the recipient of a couple of these gift certificates ($10 is still better than nothing, might as well use 'em if you have 'em), I went about seeing how to get myself a paid account.
Most of you have probably noticed that LJ has three possible methods of payment -- credit card, PayPal, and something called WebMoney. Credit card is not an option for me: I have applied to four different institutions in the past four months and not a one will give me a credit card, including my own bank (the most recent rejection cited my not having credit history as the reason. Which, uh, how exactly am I supposed to get credit history if I can't get a credit card).
I do, however, have a PayPal account with my debit card, so naturally I picked that. BZZT! Sorry, LJ only accepts instant payments from PayPal, which means you need at least two debit cards linked to your PP account, or-- you guessed it-- a credit card. Do not pass go, do not pay $20. Well, shit.
So what is this curious WebMoney thing? LJ informs me that if I make an account there, I can "send $15.00 WMZ to WebMoney purse Z336511015510", tack an order number somewhere in a ridiculously specified format, and have it processed in two days. Eh, okay. I figure it's worth looking into, so I sign up.
Now, what does neither LJ nor WebMoney tell you about this enterprise (unless you look carefully)? For starters, it is run by Russians. And I'm not particularly fond of being xenophobic, so that's not reason enough to make me boycott it or completely mistrust it out of hand (I reserve that for Microsoft products)-- however. Upon registering, I discovered that an awwwwful lot of (rather important!) instructions there? Are in cyrillic. With no translation.
Hmm.
Maybe those important-looking services are not so important after all? It's possible! So I go about trying to figure out how to add purses in what currency and oh hey I just created a European one by accident so I'll go remove it-- oh. You can't remove purses? That's... not very reassuring.
What about adding money to purses so I can actually buy stuff? What about paying money out of a purse somewhere else so I can buy an LJ account? Here's an FAQ! It is... not very helpful. It just keeps leading back to a page that tries to log me into WebMoney Classic, when I only signed up for WebMoney Mini. There is a Mini tab, however, so I click that and follow the instructions there.
The page requires a client certificate.
Oops.
Is there another way to login to Mini? Let's try from the main site. Nnnope, leads to the same page (after a rather stupefying search form. Why do they need to search for their own users?). Elsewhere in the FAQ? More of the same.
By this point I decide I don't need this, so I try to find a link somewhere to cancel my account. ...None of that either. So now I am waiting for their support desk to get back to my submitted help ticket with either a "okay, we've deleted your account", a "you have to login and do it yourself. Sorry you can't log in", or a "why would we allow users to delete their personal information? That's silly".
The moral of this story is: don't use WebMoney, and LJ clearly doesn't want our cash.
Except maybe unless you're Russian. And even then.
Can we all just move to DreamWidth now? They're more expensive, but their holiday deal is that for every 6 months of paid account time that you purchase for somebody else, they give you 2 months of paid account time for free. |
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