PayPal Money Module



After Adam Frisby did announce his DTL PayPal Money Module for OpenSim about a month ago, which got much positive feedback, I did test it intensively and I did extend it’s functionality. Last week Adam and I did decide, that it is the best if I continue to work on it using a fork of his GIT repository.

You can find that GIT repository with the latest version of the PayPal money module for OpenSim here:  http://github.com/SnoopyPfeffer/Mod-PayPal This fork has been renamed from DTL-PayPal to Mod-PayPal to avoid confusion.

Functional Extensions and Bug Fixes

• User2User pay, User2Object pay, User2Object purchases and User2Land purchases work properly, now
• User2User payments are confirmed with instant messages to senders and receivers
• Support for group owned objects and land can be enabled (default: off); requirement: PayPal email accounts have to be defined per group
• Underscores in email addresses do not cause error messages during OpenSim startup anymore
• Object and land purchases for US$ 0 do not initiate a PayPal transaction anymore
• Object purchases properly transfer the purchased contents to the buyer, now
• User email addresses are loaded from the local OpenSim.ini file; invalid email adresses are ignored, but loading is not aborted anymore
• User email addresses can also be fetched from the Users grid service, if that feature is enabled (default: off); fetched email addresses are cached by the region server until region restart; local email addresses always take precedence, to ensure an acceptable level of security
• Locally defined user email addresses should be used for all users that receive bigger amounts of money within a region (i.e. shop owners); the reason is the much higher security, if these email addresses are not fetched from the Users grid service; beside that it is possible to locally use a special PalPal micropayment account for all shop transactions to save fees, instead of a standard PayPal account used elsewhere
• Group email addresses can be defined per group UUID in the local ini file to support group owned objects and land as mentioned before
• Non existent user or group email addresses are handled by showing warning messages, instead of error messages for crashed code
• Added start and success log messages for all kinds of PayPal transactions
• Rounding problems made it impossible to pay certain amounts (like US$ 1.23); now all amounts work and are displayed nicely

Interesting findings

• PayPal can send money to all email accounts, even to email accounts not registered at PayPal yet; thus it is not necessary to handle that case
• PayPal micropayment accounts are not available in all countries worldwide

To Do List

• Web pages that are shown after successful or cancelled PayPal transactions
• Locking for PayPal transactions while buying land or original objects
• Events or functions that allow to lock vendors while a PayPal transaction is in progress
• Too small amounts that do not cover the PayPal transaction fees produce a misleading error message on the PayPal web page; maybe it would be good to be able to define a minimum amount globally and/or per email address to avoid that
• It would be good if a scripter using llGiveMoney gets a warning message, that this function is not supported by the PayPal money module
• User2User payments are confirmed with instant messages to the sender and receiver of money, but only if these users are online at that time; maybe it is possible to improve that, so that even users offline get such confirmation messages as stored offline messages

Installation of the PayPal Money Module

• Install the addon-modules/mod-paypal under OpenSim/Region/OptionalModules/
• Install the files-for-bin-dir in the OpenSim bin folder
• Add the additional config settings in the config-include subfolder or in the OpenSim.ini file in your bin folder
• After that compile OpenSim

If you find bugs or if you have ideas for the future development of this module, please send me an email (snoopy.pfeffer@yahoo.com). Thank!