I just got the following in an email.
That can’t be right. My charter subscription doesn’t expire until next year. It’s just the title that’s ending. But this implies that if I don’t renew the title I’ll become a guest.
Is this just a badly written email? Or did someone flip the wrong switches on the ENIAC and cross-wire the two so that title now affect membership instead of the reverse?
Apparently the system sends that email out to all expiring subscriptions, regardless of the type.
Since we did a hack in the subscription system to accommodate custom titles, the system simply sends this heads up email by default.
Your custom title is expiring; your Charter Member subscription has another expiration date. You should be able to view all these dates from the User Control Panel.
Custom titles go for 8 bux a year. We hope you resubscribe. You have a nice custom title, I’d hate to see it go away.
That’s what I figured. But with the expiration coming up, everybody will be getting one of these and I thought having it cleared up in print would be helpful.
Thanks for the quick answer.
You should be able to at least mess with the template to have it say, “If this is not a custom title subscription and you do not extend…”
Read out loud in the right tone of voice, this could sound like a thinly veiled threat.
“Hate to see anything… unpleasant… happen to that nice custom title of yours…”
Hee hee 
It was a threat. She knows where he lives, and has a nice, new Louisville Slugger she wants to try out.
FYI, to change the wording, you just have to edit the variable paidsubscription_reminder from the AdminCP. Go to Phrase Manager / Search in Phrases and type “paidsubscription_reminder” in the Search for Text box, then change the Search in… button from “Phrase text only” to “Phrase Variable name only”. This will pop up the variables for both the email subject and the body text, with edit buttons next to them.
Can I suggest changing the email to simply say something like:
(That’s not a typo in the link, you need HTML, not vB code.)
“Custom titles break, squire.” [crash!] “Aw, see now, my partner’s clumsy!”