[Coda]

Ah, that's not a stupid question at all, and I'm glad you asked.

When you're dealing with a payment processing center, such as PayPal or a credit card company, a "chargeback" is something that happens when the customer disputes a charge. The processing company will perform a chargeback against the seller -- that is, it makes a "charge" "back" to cancel the payment and force a refund. This usually comes with a hefty fee attached to it as a penalty for abusing the service, since a seller isn't supposed to be charging the buyer money for something that wasn't agreed upon.

Now, many times, a disgruntled customer will buy something, get the product, and then dispute the charge. The credit card company processes a chargeback, the customer gets the money back, and the customer KEEPS the product. The chargeback process is intended to handle payments that were never authorized in the first place (or to handle a vendor that's ignoring their own dispute policies) and disputing a charge that you did indeed authorize is illegal -- it's fraud.

Processing companies have an appeals process in place for a seller that's had a fraudulent chargeback made against them, but it's a lengthy process. The last time we had to deal with a chargeback through PayPal, it was... I believe it was over three months before we got our money back because PayPal had to do an investigation to show that the donator had actually authorized the payment and that we had actually delivered what we promised to deliver (which is to say, nothing; there's a reason that these are technically donations). During this time, we were down a LOT of money because someone had disputed something like $200 worth of runes, but we had already invested that donation in server costs and payments for artwork, so we lost $200 plus the chargeback fees out of Trisphee's bank account -- money that Trisphee didn't HAVE to lose. We had to put some of our own money into paying the server bills for the next month while we were waiting for the appeal. We did ultimately WIN the appeal and get our money back, but that was a rough period of time.

Trisphee will never charge your PayPal account unless you specifically ask us to do so, and money sent to us is a donation -- you're giving us a gift and you're not technically getting anything in return, so it's invalid to complain that we didn't deliver a promised product. (The runes are a courtesy, a form of thanks, and they're technically still property of Trisphee.) The staff is full of real live human beings and we're happy to work with you if something bad happens -- for example, if someone else uses your PayPal account to donate and you didn't give permission for it. We can and will deal with these kinds of problems personally, and doing so doesn't invoke any fees except for a small processing fee. So if someone were to complain to PayPal instead of working with us, we stand to lose a lot of money, so we're going to strip the offender's account of the runes and items (because they took their money back) and then ban them (because they cost us money by not following the rules).

I hope this wasn't too wall-of-texty!