Several people have written to ask what sort of relationship exists between their WP Questions accounts and their PayPal account. I apologize that we did not do a better job explaining this. The answer is that there is no relationship.
Some people thought that if they wanted to ask a question, they needed to use the same email address on WP Questions as they use with PayPal. The answer is no, not at all.
Your PayPal account is separate from your WP Questions account. Once you ask a question, you will be taken to PayPal. At that point, you can type in any account info that you choose. We do not store your PayPal info. If you used one PayPal account one day (to pay for a question), but then a different account a different day (to pay for a different question), we would not automatically know. We could piece it together if we wanted to, by looking to see what user id is associated with the question being paid for, but my point is we do not explicitly tie your questions to any particular PayPal account.
There is one situation where you will need to have your WP Questions email address associated with a PayPal account: if you are an expert and you have won money by answering questions. When you make a withdrawal from WP Questions we send the money, via PayPal, to whatever email address you are using for your WP Questions account. So, at some point, you’ll want that email address to be attached to a PayPal account.
How do you get your money? If you are an expert and you’ve won some money by answering questions, go to your user dashboard and withdraw the money. Look for the words “Withdraw cash to PayPal?”. If you have a balance of $100 in your WP Questions account, you could type 100 into that form, then hit the “Withdraw Cash” button, and the money will be sent via PayPal to whatever email address is associated with your WP Questions account.
Those of you who are simply asking questions are free to use one email address on this site, and an entirely different email address on PayPal.
If anyone ever needs to change the email address they are using for their WP Questions account, they can do so on their user dashboard.
By the way, you can also upload an avatar for your user account on that page. We encourage people to do so.
Finally, please note, our fees are in addition to the prize money. So if you are asking a question and you are putting up $20 as a prize, we will charge you $2.30 in addition (that is 9% plus 50
cents). So when our software redirects you to PayPal, you will be asked to pay $22.30.
Thanks for the detailed explanation !
I have a simple suggestion that could help reduce the confusion.
Why not just add simple (?) javascript or ajax help information next to each of the boxes ?
You have the space for the help text already 🙂
here is the profile page showing the space.
http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/6325/helpinfo.png
Shiva, thanks much for the feedback. You are right, we could add in some explanatory text on the page where users edit their account info. I’ll add this to our to-do list on Basecamp.