2011-10-13 Calgary Paypal Broken
When someone sends a money request to you via PayPal, the encoding of the URL in the "Pay Now" button is broken.
I received a request today from a business. I kept clicking the Pay Now button in the email, and it would bring me to the status page of my PayPal account, instead of actually providing me with a method of paying the invoice.
Initially I phoned PayPal to find out why I could not pay, they told me to try a different email address? I laughed and figured the support person was just trying to get me off the phone, as usual with support people  .
When I tried again, I noticed the URL had a bunch of encoded characters %3d (=) and %26 (&). That won't get parsed correctly by their URL parser because clearly encoding the entire url would be silly. Encoding the entire url would not let the parser recognize the difference between attributes and values. So I changed the encoded characters to their ascii symbols and the URL worked and brought me to the correct Pay For This Request page.
Well, I phoned PayPal back to let them know their system is broken. I spoke to a customer service person who insisted I was having trouble with my account and it wasn't the system. Yes, I realize she isn't trained to understand what I was telling her. I stated "Your website is broken, you can look like an all-star if you forward me to someone who can help". She insisted there is no such thing as technical support and all I can do is write to the general email address (Service@paypal.com). Well, needless to say that was the extent of my patience, so I hung up.
This is the URL that was included in the email: https://www.paypal.com/us/cmd%3d_prq%26id%3dxMnjM-LmL.Q8LWSd20G0G4m0EhEy8bQGJ9RQ
This is what the URL SHOULD look like: https://www.paypal.com/us/cmd=_prq&id=xMnjM-LmL.Q8LWSd20G0G4m0EhEy8bQGJ9RQ
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