Mike,
at the risk of insulting you, did you even bother to read what I wrote in yesterday's post ?
Two weeks ago, the guest account facility worked properly. Yesterday, it did not as my attempted purchase was dumped into a loop because they changed the code on that page. If they were a reputable company, then I would have expected that the changes would have included some statement about the change from "guest" to "optional" facility. The one change that could be seen was the appearance of a link in the bottom right hand corner pointing to the page for which I included the link above. Whatever other changes were made prevented the page from working as it has in the past. What happened to Quality Assurance testing before the changed code was released for public use ? What about prior notification that the facility is changing before any changes are made to the released system ?
You say that you've been using an account for "many years" without problems. Given the above, all that means is that you have been lucky. It's a giant leap from that reality to your opinion that it means that their system is "safe".
Furthermore, in an earlier post, I stated that I do have an account, which I've held for "many years", which I suspect is much longer than your period. In fact, before I could make use of that account, I discovered that the new account procedures that this would invoke were discriminating against non-U.S. customers. When I complained about that, the account was suspended without explanation. When I asked for the account to be deleted instead, my requests (following their other procedures) were ignored. Later, I discovered that a suspended account couldn't even use the guest facility. Later still, I received a marketing email from them from which I somehow discovered that the account was no longer suspended.
Between creating the account and it being suspended, I read many posts on their support forum about customers who had had problems. Of course, some of those could have been caused by the customers themselves since "user errors" are nothing new. However, it was apparent from some posts that the service had been hacked (as we would say now) at some time in the past.
Something else to bear in mind is that they are an American company, which means they are not bound by either U.K. or European law. As such, the personal data held in your account has no legal protection. Moreover, I've recently been plagued with a deluge of emails about a new, expensive flight simulator, which is actually a scam because that simulator (FlightGear) is freely available on the web. The emails have been arriving at both my present personal email address and my previous personal email address, which was discontinued a few years ago. PayPal is one of the few companies who knew both of those addresses, but of course I have no evidence that they sold their mailing list, and I sincerely doubt whether they would admit to having done so.
Even worse is that they hold the details entered when you use the "guest" or "optional" facility without stating what details those are, in contravention of the U.K. Data Protection act and E.U. directive.
In short, in my opinion they are just another predatory American company, who will do anything to get their hands on your account, after which you have no choice but to accept whatever changes they make to their terms and conditions. Just try cancelling your account ...
Finally, I suspect that you're not one to distinguish between "need" and "want" when it comes to buying something. I happen to have principles, which means that I recognise that I don't actually need anything that's available for any of my simulators, though there are a few things that I do or would want. So far, I have made a conscious choice to use the "guest" facility to buy some add-ons including volume 4 of ScotFlight for Orbx. Given all of the above, there is no guarantee that I will do so in the future, for there is no way that I will ever give PayPal details of my main credit or debit cards.
Ro
