Paypal for Century and MHCC membership

Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2008 5:11 pm

Starting this week (July 23 or so) you will be able to use Paypal to register for the MHCC century and to pay for or renew MHCC membership. Please use this Forum thread to report any problems (you can also email fkelly@nycap.rr.com but I would prefer that most problems get reported here so that everyone can see what they are and what the resolutions are).

To use Paypal or register for the century, you must be logged in to the web page under your own username. If you have problems such as a lost password you can use the lost password feature or you can use the problem email link on the top of the home page. We will get back to you, maybe not instantly but usually pretty quickly.

Generally speaking, each person should pay for his own registration or membership with his/her own credit card. Sorry, but I don't have time to write shopping cart software or deal with the complexities of letting you register in one name and pay with another. Whatever name you put on the MHCC screens is what gets sent to Paypal. I believe you may be able to finesse this limitation by changing the contact information in Paypal after you have registered or paid for a membership on the MHCC pages, but I have no way to test this. Please post here if you try this and are able to so that other people will know.

For MHCC membership, you can see the MHCC information box in the upper left of the web page when you sign on. What this does is compare the email address you have registered with the site with the one you have stored in the MHCC membership tables. Be aware that site email has to match with your MHCC email for the system to work properly. Just use the problem email link on the home page if it doesn't. We will fix it up for you and get back to you, again generally within a day.

Finally, I want to make it clear that no credit card information is ever stored or even seen on our site. Your information is sent to Paypal where you input your credit card code. It is validated there, the charges are rung up and you are returned to our site. Behind the scenes Paypal sends us back information about what you purchased and what you paid but NO CREDIT CARD information. Then the money is automatically deposited in the MHCC bank account by Paypal. If there are any questions, we have at least three different "logs" where we can look up what happened.

Also, if you get any emails from Paypal that ask you to go to a web site, or to provide any information, these are almost certainly scams that are unrelated to any payments you are making here. Just delete them. There is a 99.9% likelihood that these are "phishing" attempts by scam artists pretending to have a Paypal site. Do not open the mail or go to any site listed in them.

Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2008 3:41 pm

I have had questions about whether Paypal is secure and also reports of some problems getting Paypal to accept your credit card information.

On the first, all I can say is that Paypal is used for millions of transactions by people all over the world and that it uses the latest and best security technology available. All your data is encrypted before and after it leaves your PC for the web and throughout the web. And as I mentioned in my previous post none of your credit card data is EVER passed through our web site. Nothing is ever totally secure but it's my personal opinion that Paypal is many times more secure than sending a paper check through the US Mail.

Second as to problems. Paypal is going to validate the name, address, zip code, credit card number and security code against whatever is registered for your credit card. If there is ANY discrepancy your card will be rejected. So if your credit card says Ron or Frank and you input Ronald or Francis, you are likely to be rejected. At the MHCC site we have no control over these validations or how user friendly they are or how they are laid out. All we know is that when we send your transaction to Paypal your record is pending and we don't mark it paid until Paypal sends back information that you have paid.

For the century you can use still use a paper check if either the security or operational problems with Paypal bother you. For MHCC membership you can still print out and send in the paper forms but if you choose to pay for your membership through Paypal then you will have to get through the validation process.

That said, billion dollar operations such as EBAY would not be operational if millions of transactions weren't processed through Paypal. So have patience and work through it with us. If anyone who uses Paypal more than I do has any further tips please feel free to post them here.

Regular Joined: Feb 23, 2005 Posts: 44 Location: Delmar

Thanks very much for implementing PayPal Frank! I recently used it to renew my MHCC membership and the transaction was very smooth.

I've used PayPal for many years and have never had a problem of any kind.

Barry