Paypal - Please fix your irritating bug with Cookies !

[argh]

Re-posting, since I posted this back in April, and the bug still exists, and still causes problems for me EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Dear Paypal,

You've had a bug that's been an issue for many Paypal users for YEARS.

While it can happen with IE, it happens more often with Chrome and Firefox.

Basically, you make extensive use of HTTP cookies, and after some time, the cookies get large or otherwise in a state where they cause errors for people when they try to log into paypal.

Search Google for any of the following:

paypal Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand

paypal your last action could not be completed

You'll see hundreds of thousands of results, with people seeing this problem as far back as 2009.

It's this documented issue: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/helpcenter/article/?currentIssueID=163367&m=SRE

Your, er, "fix" is to ask people to clear all their cookies.  This is, of course, a crappy solution, because it clears cookies for EVERY single site they've ever visited.   Which, of course, means they lose all of the great functionality those cookies provided for EVERY single site they use.   ( prefilling login id's, etc).  Additionally, I can't tell you how confusing this is for non-technical users.  Had to walk my mother through "deleting cookies" this morning because of this paypal issue.  Her response was "Aren't they a big company...can't they fix this?"

Since you're obviously catching the problem programmatically (the presented page looks like an exception handler) why is it that you don't just programmatically delete and/or truncate the cookies at that point?

It's a trivial piece of javascript to do so.   And, a fix would bring you back lost revenue from people that give up and make payment in some other way.  Do you really think that most non-technical people figure out how to "remove cookies"?

Anyhow, in summary, you have an opportunity to fix something in less than 10 lines of javascript that would

- Please your end users

- Add back lost revenue

- Stop irritating your vendor users that lose revenue to this bug.

Why is it that you've passed over this opportunity for 3+ years?

[jessbosari]

This was moved to an archive (https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/My-Feedback-for-PayPal-Archive/Paypal-Please-fix-the-cookie-prob...) and PayPal didn't respond, so I thought I would. I agree PayPal should just fix this with javascript, but that's not going to happen. Here's how you can fix it for yourself:

When you get the cookie error page, do this:

IE: go into cookies, find the cookie based on the URL of the error (usually starts after the "click&uid=" part of the URL) and delete the problematic cookie.

Firefox: same thing

Chrome: use the extension "Edit this Cookie." When the error comes up, click the little cookie icon in your menu bar. You'll see a list of cookies come up for that url. Find the right one and delete it. All better.

Opera: Go to Preferences, Advanced, Cookies and click on the Manage Cookies button to find the problem cookie.

Hope this helps!