Let people do their own paypal config

[pjf]

This is one of our most common support requests. It shouldn't be. As far as I can tell, doing a paypal setup is just setting a field in the database, because that's what's done by the script run by support monkeys like myself.

This is something users should be able to do from their own user page. It shouldn't involve a support request at all.

Relevant discussions: #2177 (my stumbling to do paypal changes), and #2125 (Fraud HOWTO, where I'll discuss the fraud implications).

[pjf]

I know this may be a duplicate issue, but I can't seem to find the original, so I'm opening this in case it's not.

In either case, I've got $10 worth of bounties to throw at this to start getting it off the ground (which I'll add via bountysource once we figure if this is a duplicate or not).

[Changaco]

From reading http://building.gittip.com/policies/configure-paypal it seems to me that not allowing users to set up paypal themselves is intentional:

We're flying under PayPal's radar right now. It's unlikely that we'll be able to use them at scale (because we're a marketplace and they won't want to underwrite us; see #63), so we're doing this quasi-manually and not first-class.

[pjf]

@Changaco : Then we're in a terrible position. Requiring people to email support unnecessarily sucks up lots of time for humans. Letting people do this themselves reduces friction, but means more people will use PayPal more often. Allowing users to self-service but adding some sort of extra friction to prevent too many people from setting up PayPal would free up support while still limiting growth of PayPal usage, but that feels like a jerk move, because it is a jerk move.

If PayPal are going to shut down their support for us at some point, we should be planning for that day, since it's going to happen regardless of what we do.

Right now I feel we're getting the worst of both worlds; we're wasting lots of human time, and we're not mitigating the risk of PayPal not wanting to deal with us in the long term. :/

[chadwhitacre]

@pjf Your analysis of our situation here is spot-on. It's gross. :-(

This issue is entangled with #126. The reason we support PayPal at all is as a band-aid for non-U.S. payouts. See the description of #126 for our current status. There are a few options but none are trivial. The worst-case scenario I see is that PayPal freezes us sooner rather than later, and then we fast-track one of the options for #126. The mitigation for our PayPal risk is to move forward on #126 sooner rather than later.

[chadwhitacre]

★★☆

[chadwhitacre]

IRC

[patcon]

What if adding/editing the paypal field automatically set the suspicious flag on their account for later review, and we let them know if would require manual review (and they might miss a payday as we review?)

[chadwhitacre]

Especially with our new terms of service (#3408), I think it's time to implement this. We've been using PayPal without incident for years now, and Patreon does, too.

[rohitpaulk]

Most of the sites I've dealt with require PayPal emails to be verified emails on the platform. I'm proceeding with the same here, objections?

[chadwhitacre]

No objections, that sounds good to me.

[chadwhitacre]

Done in #3462.