This month, PayPal made some small changes and simplifications to its user agreement policy. Changes made will become effective as of November 1st, 2010.

Some countries were excluded for certain personal transactions, currency conversion was simplified, the buyer is more protected and many minor changes were implemented in the terms of use and the privacy policy. Hopefully, PayPal will become safer and transactions will not be blocked anymore.

Amendment to PayPal User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Commercial Entity Agreement

The other great news for business or link directory owners is that phpLinkDirectory reached version 4.1 and dumped Smarty validation for jQuery.

“Ever get frustrated with the numerous Smarty Validation errors? We certainly did! While smarty is still great as a template system, the validation possible with Jquery is much more advanced, and easy to use. One of our developers who works regularly with our customers in the jobs area was ecstatic to find out we had made the decision to switch to Jquery. As you add submit items you have numerous choices on validators you can use. For example, you can make a field validate for a URL or an email, meaning that if the user fails to enter a URL in the field, they are given a warning message. There is plenty of room from a developer standpoint too to add your own custom validators.”

Another great addition is custom fields. Just like WordPress, you are now able to add as many fields for a listing as you want. I’m sure this minor addition will set the start for hundreds of custom directories, and, maybe, bring the directory fever back. I’m sure that the validation changes will generate a series of small updates, and I will test it on my business directory. It’s a great for me chance to enhance it even more and add or remove any custom fields I want.

Read the release article here.

You might also be interested in Google’s privacy policy updates for October 3rd.

“We will be deleting twelve of these product-specific policies to reduce unnecessary redundancies and/or to better reflect how the products work together. These twelve products will continue to be governed by the main Google Privacy Policy. We are also updating the main Google Privacy Policy to make it more user-friendly. Specifically, we are reducing redundancies and updating some of the legal language to make it more clear to users.”

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