PayPal donate button not submitting/redirecting properly internet explorer 8 and 9?

Question

At http://dev.respectfulrevolution.org/you we have three PayPal donate "buttons"/forms that all work fine in all tested browsers except for IE8 and IE9. Instead of PayPal redirecting you to the appropriate donation page, it redirects you to the PayPal home/login page with a message telling you to login first. After you login, it tells you the link is outdated and you never get to the donation page.

Ideas? You can also see the production version at http://www.respectfulrevolution.org/you .

Answer 1

Oh the embarrassment. Turns out this had nothing to do with IE8/9 or PayPal. Instead, I was submitting a form to PayPal without the necessary data for what the hosted_button_id was, what the cmd was, etc, etc. When I looked into the issue on IE8/9, I noticed that my hidden form inputs that were to contain this data were blank. What gives and why only on IE8/9?

Well, this is the embarrassment. I have a function that is run only if the form input attribute placeholder isn't supported and of tested browsers, IE8/9 were the only ones not to support. In my placeholder fallback function I had sloppily targeted all form inputs and basically blanked out the values.

So all in all, the problem was in my code. However, others who have similar symptoms should ensure that they are submitting all the necessary data to PayPal, others you may end up on the home page with a small error message.