Announcing two different ways to participate in DEF CON Safe Mode: Human and Human Plus.

[Dark Tangent]

Announcing two different ways to participate in DEF CON Safe Mode: Human and Human Plus.

https://plus.defcon.org/

DEF CON is supported by the worldwide community of hackers through sales of attendee badges, branded clothing, and related stuff but not through corporate sponsorships.

This year is different than in-person because Safe Mode is both free and on-line, and there are no required badges to attend, but we still have expenses. Some people have approached us wanting to financially help support Safe Mode and we have come up with something they can buy and something we can give them in return.

We plan to have a "Human Plus" role and grant it different permissions for those who support Safe Mode with a $20 payment to our PayPal.

Here is the differences between the two Human roles:

Human (free): You can go to the different rooms, participate in contests, events, listen to DJs and watch talks. Primarily uses text to send messages, uses the system emoji, use reactions, and you can listen to audio and video in channels that support them.

Human Plus ($20): Same as Human with these additional permissions: You get a different role name to show you have supported Safe Mode, the ability to post pictures and embed links, you can use external emoji, you have the ability to change your nickname, join some Human Plus chill out rooms, and to engage with voice and video in the rooms that support it.

[dogeared]

trying to pay at plus.defcon.org. It gets stuck on "Please wait...". Both on Firefox and Brave...

[number6]

This issue has been reported. There is a known issue between us and paypal, which hasn't been diagnosed. A ticket has been opened.
Best advice? Hold-off on trying again right now. Try again in a few hours.

[dogeared]

Thanks for letting me know! (Be seeing you)

[number6]

Update: The goon looking into this payment issue is the multi-classed Cstone working for InHuman Reg and DEV OPS and more; There is an issue with getting HumanPlus/Human+/H+ is presently looking at the issue where it says says "Please wait..."

Are there any other issues?

Suggestions:
1) If the payment completed and you have an invoice ID

Then try:
https://plus.defcon.org/recover.html


2) If you had HumanPlus/Human+/H+ and lost it, please try using the "Invoice ID" like above and check:
https://plus.defcon.org/recover.html

3a) Are you trying to make a purchase from outside the USA, or using a bank account/credit-card which does not primarily work in USD, or have your browser set to use default language other than English? One or more of these may be causing problems. The cause is not known, but there is a correlation between users with trouble paying and the same users being from outside the USA when making the purchase.
* No Advice yet: Cstone is working with an international user who was having problems to try to diagnose that issue, right now.

3) If you are using a browser and it is reporting "please wait" try being patient and see if it times out. Some early reports:
* Try completing payment in a "private" or "incognito" tab: this has resolved it for 3/3 people that previously had problems.
* Maybe an issue with the browser Brave: if it times-out try using Chrome/Chromium or Firefox
* May be an issue with paypal taking a long time to complete the transaction: one user said it took 1 hour before he received a document like the above with an InvoiceID so they could recover the HumanPlus/Human+/H+ status

4) Another issue has been reported: Transaction eventually results in money being removed from the account, but no HumanPlus/Human+/H+ role on the server and no Invoice ID document:
* So far, for all of these reports, the person reports than a few minutes, 10 minutes , 20 minutes later, paypal put the money back into their account so they could try again.

Suggestions made:
* Try completing payment in a "private" or "incognito" tab: this has resolved it for 3/3 people that previously had problems.
* This seems correlated with using PayPal as a gateway, and not having and using an account with PayPal.
* Problems appear to be using PayPal as a gateway (no paypal account used) and a credit card is used, but worked fine with using a bank account.


If you find something works, or any advice here helps, please provide feedback for others to help them succeed, too.