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What is commonly referred to as the Second Commandment can be found in two places in Scripture.

You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain. – Exodus 20:7, Deuteronomy 5:11

A friend of mine posted a status update on his Facebook wall, where he called into question the use of the acronym OMG (Oh My God) by Christians and its apparent condemnation in Scripture. Unfortunately he had to delete his status update because so many of his friend were offended, feeling like they had been called out for breaking the Second Commandment.

I have a few thoughts on this topic and I would like to share them. I do not believe “God” is God’s name. In fact, a good theology teacher would admit to you that we do not really know what his name is. According to most, it seems to be YHWH which is usually pronounced Yahweh (Ya-Way). This comes from Exodus 3:14. There are no vowels in written Hebrew — well there weren’t any vowels when the Old Testament was written. So the pronunciation of YHWH is a tradition. Most decent theologians should admit that the true pronunciation of YHWH is lost. Many believe that the Jewish nation was so afraid of using God’s name in vain, that they used the vowel sounds of the Hebrew word for Lord and transposed them onto YHWH which is where we get Yahweh. They did this to be extra careful not to actually say his name (in case it was in vain).

There is one other place in Scripture where God refers to himself by name. But it is not YHWH, if you look at Exodus 34:14 God says, “for you shall not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” God’s name might not actually be “Jealous” it could be a “you are what you eat” thing. You can call God, Jealous, because he is jealous. I am not going to get into what he is jealous of or even if it is his actual name, it’s merely an interesting place in Scripture where he names himself.

Presently, we refer to God as “God” and treat that as if it were his real name — but it clearly isn’t. So I have a couple of questions…

1. Is saying OMG breaking the 2nd Commandment? In other words, is the mere reference to God breaking the 2nd commandment if it is done in vain?
2. Is saying OMG but meaning “Goodness” or “Gosh” more acceptable?

I would love to hear your input on this. I am really torn on this subject. Personally, I try not say “God” in vain… but I am not entirely convinced that it is wrong either.

I recently soft-launched my leenk.me web app. leenk.me is a subscription based service that allows people to automatically post to Twitter and Facebook (more coming) whenever they post new content to their WordPress websites. I set the pricing as cheaply as I could, 99 cents every quarter for the basic account, and 2.99$ every quarter for plus accounts. I am using PayPal as my payment gateway, which is probably the easiest and fastest payment gateway to setup. I use to really like PayPal, I would have recommended PayPal to anyone, but their customer service stinks and this problem is just dumbfounding.

I found out a couple days before soft-launch that PayPal has this arbitrary 20% limit on increases to subscriptions. So, if I have a customer who wants to increase their basic membership to a plus membership, PayPal will reject the transaction automatically. The only “work around” is for the customer to cancel their basic membership and sign up for the plus membership. In other words, a real pain in the butt!

This was the conversation log I had with PayPal customer support via email:

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

Subject:  Amount  can  only  be  increased  by 20%

I  just  found  out  that  it  is not  possible  to  increase  a  subscription  by  20%.  My  web  service  has  two account  types,  the  Basic  account  is  .99$  every  three  months  and  the  Plus
account  is  2.99$  every  three  months.

Obviously,  20%  of  .99$  is  .20$,  so  I  am  well  exceeding  the  20%  limit.  I want  to  allow  my  customers  to  upgrade/downgrade  their  accounts  as  they want.  What  are  my  options?

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Dear Lew Ayotte,

Hello, my name is ***** and I am happy to assist you with your question regarding the subscription amount.

In this case, you need to create another subscription button indicating the current amount.

Note: You can create a basic button without logging in, however for advanced button customization you will need to log in. To use the button designer, your web browser must be JavaScript enabled.

1. Go to the PayPal website and log in to your account.
2. Click “Merchant Services” at the top of the page.
3. Click “Subscribe” under Create Buttons.
4. Enter your information to customize the button to your needs.
5. Click “Create Button.”
6. Click “Select Code” to select the button code.
7. Copy and paste the button code into your own web page code.

Note: After creating your first button, click “Go to My saved buttons” and bookmark this page for easy access to your saved buttons.

Thanks for sharing your concerns with us. We value what you have to say, and we know situations like this can be difficult. If you have more questions, visit our Help Center by clicking “Help” in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

Sincerely,
*****
PayPal Consumer Support
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

My issue is with the 20% increase limitation on current subscribers wanting to upgrade.

If a current subscriber is paying .99$/mo for a basic account and wants to change their recurring payment to 2.99$/mo PayPal won’t let them, because it is over the 20% limit on increases.

Thank you.

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Dear Lew Ayotte,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Hello my name is ****, I am sorry to hear about the situation regarding the limit that you would like to impose for your subscription, and understand your frustration and concern over this issue.  I am happy to assist you with your questions.

If you have customer who would like to upgrade, you can create another subscription with the upgraded amount by going to the Merchant Services tab and click on the Subscribe button. This will generate a new html code, however, instead of using the button code, there will be an email
tab on your “You are viewing your button code” page where you can copy and paste the link and send that link to your customer via an email so your customer can just click on the “Subscribe” button once he receives the email from you.

Thanks for sharing your concerns with us. We value what you have to say, and we know situations like this can be difficult. If you have more questions, visit our Help Center by clicking “Help” in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

Sincerely,
****
PayPal Consumer Support
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

Hello,

I am confused; sending the customer a new subscription code will upgrade their current recurring payment from my .99$ plan to the 2.99$ plan without the 20% limit error (https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_WPRecurringPayments#id086530108PM__id08653060UE6)?

Thank you.

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Dear Lew Ayotte,

If you have an issue with integrating PayPal on your website and are in
need of assistance, please open a Merchant Technical Support Ticket by
following the steps below:

1. Go to www.paypal.com and log in to your account.
2. Click ?Contact Us? at the bottom of the page.
3. Enter ?How do I contact merchant technical support,? and click
?Find.?
4. Click ?Developer Support,? and then click ?Developer Support?
again.
5. Click ?Merchant Technical Support.?
6. Enter the required information and click ?Continue.?
7. Click ?Finish Submitting Question.?

Thanks for sharing your concerns with us. We value what you have to say,
and we know situations like this can be difficult. If you have more
questions, visit our Help Center by clicking “Help” in the top right
corner of any PayPal page.

Sincerely,
PayPal Customer Service Department
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

Hello,

I created a subscription service for my website. The “basic” level is 99 cents, the “plus” level is 2.99$. I want my subscribers to be able to upgrade their accounts from “basic” to “plus”. However, when I tried to do this I got the error message:

Amount can only be increased by 20%

I have read that there is some arbitrary “20% rule” and I’d like to know what my options are. Obviously there is a big difference between .99 and 2.99, I’d like to make the upgrade process as easy as possible for my subscribers.

Thank you.
Lew A

P.S. This will be the fourth time I’ve asked this question. The first two answers told me to create a new subscription button. The third answer told me to contact you, “Merchant Technical Services”.

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Hello Lew Ayotte,

Thank you for contacting us about Website Payments Standard Subscription on the PayPal Live Site.

We are reviewing your issue and will get back to you when we have an update.

Sincerely,
Merchant Technical Services
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Hello Lew,

thank you for contacting MTS Technical Service.

It is indeed true that you can only increase the amount by 20% which is not the case for you. That’s why you get this error message. Unfortunately, there is nothing what we can do about this.

Feel free to contact us if you have further questions.

Kind regards,

*******

If you are using switch_to_blog() in your WordPress MultiSite installation and notice that your permalinks contain “/blog/” in them (or some other oddity). The give John James Jacoby’s plugin Switch Site Rewrite a go.

Today I ran into this problem with a WPMS site that I am developing. I needed to pull posts from the “news” site onto the main site. I used switch_to_blog() to do this, but when I tried to get specific category permalinks with get_category_links() it would automatically include “/blog/” in the URL.

This is because of the way that the $wp_rewrite variable is initialized and an attempt to reduce overhead when using switch_to_blog(). So, John’s plugin does come with a risk of added overhead, but I’m currently dealing with a 30 site installation and don’t see much of  a cost. If you were really picky, you could modify his code a bit to only work in real specific situations.

If you get  a chance, jump on over to twitter and thank him for this little plugin. It saved me a little more development work, although it also meant I wasted 2 hours tracking down the problem :).

• last day to vote for me! :) http://thinkgeek.com/blog/2010/07/vote-for-your-favorite-sysadmi.html #fb #
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• Ok, PayPal offers a rate for Micropayments (under 10$), need to change your account type. Changes .30$ to .10$ off a .99$ transaction #
• @glennansley I am considering doing something like that… luckily micropayments still apply to a 12 month rate :) in reply to glennansley #
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• To check whether your request has been processed click… click what @paypal? http://flic.kr/p/8nQCgH #
• .@glennansley This is a "micropayment" https://micropayments.paypal-labs.com/ in reply to glennansley #
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