Learn Success With Randy Brown

Mailbag: Can Paypal keep both parties’ money in an illegal transaction?

This mailbag question comes from Brian who seems to have run-afoul of PayPal’s rules:

I participated in a paypal transaction that was a violation of the paypal user agreement (although perfectly legal).  The other party states their account has been locked along with his balance “that paypal will now keep.”  My account has no indication that a violation has occurred, nor that it is locked.  Can paypal keep funds in a persons account even if they were a violation of it’s use policy?  I could understand the 180 days thing, and closing an account, but keeping all the funds seems just wrong!  Is there any way I can at least get my money back since the guy isn’t going to deliver the product I purchased?
Thanks
Brian

I have never heard of PayPal holding money indefinitely for violating their user-agreement.  In every case that I have read about (and in my own experience), Paypal will hold the money of one or both parties for the dreaded 180 days, but not “keep” it.  If you have sent your money to the seller and you know he is not or did not ship the goods, I would follow the standard dispute procedure in the PayPal resolution center to request a refund and let PayPal work it out.  I can think of no reason why PayPal would not return your money to you.  To be safe though, I would withdraw any money from your PayPal account before you bring any attention to it – just to be safe. I also recall that when my PayPal account was temporarily banned, and they were holding my funds, I could still log-in and issue refunds to buyers – so I think your seller may be confused.. or a liar..

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Kontera bug; Fix is in the works

For about the last ten days or so there has been a bug in the Kontera ad-code causing attempts to access pages that do not exist when a visitor ‘mouses over’ a Kontera ad-unit. This bug manifests itself as a ‘404 Page Not Found’ error at the website hosting the Kontera ads. Sites with heavy traffic may see hundreds or thousands of these errors per hour.

Most errors are from trying to access the following page names:
/YahooAlgo
/FreeDictionary
/Info.com
/NewYahoo
(perhaps others, depending on your niche/content/ads targeted to your site)

My sources tell me that Kontera is aware of the problem and is working on a fix which should be pushed out in the next few days.

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Jonathan Cohen (1 comments)

Hi Randy, This is Jonathan from Kontera. The fix was pushed out successfully and everything on your site looks good. ...

15 August 10 at 12:59

How Much Would You Sell Your Website For?

I’ve recently been in talks with a media company that has expressed interest in purchasing GrownUpGeek.com.  I made it clear to them up front that I was not really interested in selling, but I would listen to what they had to offer.

What is the real value of a website? The standard way to valuate a website is to take it’s average yearly earnings and multiply that by 1 year, or 3 years, or even 5 years.  This would put the estimated sale value of Grownupgeek.com somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000.  Of course, if the buyer is more interested in just the domain name because it matched a new product or service, the value to the buyer could be much more, but sadly I have no such luck.

Going into the talks I knew/assumed that the company would already have an idea of the “standard” value of GrownUpGeek.com ($200,000 – $300,000) and I was already prepared to turn down an offer of that amount.  WHY?  Because the website will generate that much money in 4 to 5 years.  If I sell the website today for say, $300,000 then subtract taxes, escrow fees, attorney’s fees, and whatever other fee’s that come up, I would actually be losing money as opposed to holding on to the site for 3-5 years.  This does not even take into account the emotional attachments to “my baby” – I have spent the majority of the last 5 years of my life tending to, feeding, & caring for the website.  It’s my hobby, it’s my LIFE!  What the heck would I do without it?  Sure, I would have a couple of hundred thousand dollars in my pocket – but I will have that anyway over the course of the next few years.

So when asked by the big media company “what kind of number did you have in mind Mr. Brown?“  I responded with something closer to 2.5 times higher than “standard” value.   (I could hear the gasp in the room)..  Some kind of bargaining technique?  NO – It’s just worth more to me than a few hundred thousand dollars that I will most likely see anyway in the next few years.  Unfortunately the media company does not assign the same emotional value to a website that I do, and as expected, they thanked me for my time.

How much is your website worth to you?  Do you assign any sentimental or emotional value to it?  Even if it’s “just a business” to you, could you walk away from it for only 3-5 years worth of your current earnings?  Am I just a sentimental fool?

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Ray (4 comments)

An offer of $200,000 to $300,000 would be tempting, but if you are going to make more than that over ...

23 August 10 at 00:04

Wigs and Hair Pieces (1 comments)

Blog or sites are usually valued at a multiply of what they cirrently earn. Its just a matter of both ...

30 August 10 at 20:10

Drupal: How To Add A Tab To A Views Page

I finally decided to spend a few minutes and re-familiarize myself with Drupal Views.  I hadn’t used the Views module since upgrading to to Drupal 6 last year when all of my views got blown away and I wanted to start rebuilding the views I had previously created.  I had been putting it off because I was accustomed to using the old version of Views, and everything looked different in the newer Views 2.x version.

The first custom view I had previously and wanted to re-create was on the tracker-page which lists what pages have been created and commented on recently.  It was trivial to add a few fields and move things around, and I assumed it would be just as easy to add an additional tab-page.  After messing with the View-tab settings for an hour and Google-bating with myself until my hands were chapped, I finally came across an old post at Drupal.org that sort-of explained the steps necessary to create an additional tab-page on a Views page.  Since how to add a tab to Views page isn’t really documented (or, if it is, it’s not easy to find) I wanted to post it here to save anyone else the pain and frustration I went thru assuming they’ll stumble across this post while madly Googling for info the same way I was.

How to add a tab to a Views page:

On the View that you want as the default tab: In the Views ‘page settings’, set the Menu Type as ‘Default Menu Tab’ then click the little setting ‘gear’ and set the ‘parent menu item’ to ‘normal menu item’.  Set the path as “/something/tab1″; for example, “/postlist/allposts”

On the View that you want as your second (or 3rd, etc) tab, set the Menu Item Type as ‘Menu tab’.  Set the path as “/something/tab2″ for example, “/postlist/newposts”

The key to making the tabs show on the View page is the path setting!  All of the pages must have the same parent-path – in the examples above this is “/postlist”.  If the parent-paths are not the same, you will never get that damn tab to show up in the View.

Another note to avoid frustration:

If you are customizing your default Tracker page with Views, you must either use a different path-name (ie; NOT “tracker”) OR, you must disable the Drupal core ‘tracker’ module.  Otherwise you will get “page not found” errors on your custom tracker page, or when clicking the “my posts” tab.

If you stumbled across this post via Google, I hope I saved you some time and frustration.  If I did, please take a second to post a comment and say thanks.

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