WordCamp Sponsors: QBO does not accept sponsor company names that have non-Latin characters

[coreymckrill]

When a WordCamp submits a sponsor invoice, it goes into a queue to be approved by someone on the Global Community Team. Once it has been approved, it gets packaged up and submitted to Quickbooks Online (QBO, used by WPCS for invoicing) via the wordcamp-qbo-client plugin.

The problem is that QBO's API does not accept an invoice if the name of the invoice recipient (sponsor) contains multibyte characters, and possibly anything other than ASCII. Instead it spits out a cryptic Invalid content. Lexical error message, and the invoice approver sees only a notice that says ERROR: Invalid HTTP response code.

This tends to happen for WordCamp sponsors in countries that use other character sets such as Cyrillic or Thai.

One way to solve this would be to add instructions to the Company Name field in the Sponsor Info metabox specifying that the input must be spelled out with Latin characters. Often the title of the sponsor post itself is Latinized already, so it could be a simple matter of copying and pasting that. However, it seems like this could also be perceived as being very US-centric and culturally insensitive without a lengthy explanation of the technical reasons.

There also might be a way to encode the sponsor company name (and other fields) in a way that the QBO API would accept, but that will require further research.

[coreymckrill]

#2972 was marked as a duplicate.

[coreymckrill]

Copied this issue to GitHub: ​https://github.com/WordPress/wordcamp.org/issues/395