I got the following email from our Imperial Webmaster:
I’m not really going to revert back to a mere Guest and see advertising with the rest of the proletariat, am I? My Charter Membership is all paid up, so I get to retain my semi-Exalted status here, don’t I?
Confusing wording, or is someone trying to catfish me?
It’s just the custom title that is expiring. I’m guessing that it uses the same text template as the regular subscription expiration notice, which isn’t correct in this case. As long as your Charter Membership isn’t about to expire, you shouldn’t be changed to a Guest.
If something weird happens, let us know and we’ll fix it.
I’ll send a note to our admin to see if we can get that text changed for Custom Title expirations.
I assume it means that your custom title subscription for “You mean he’s STILL here?” is about to expire. I think there’s separate versions for Members and Charter Members because of the way the DB is set up.
I’m honestly less concerned about reverting to Guest than I am about someone spoofing The Straight Dope and trying to phish.
I heard back from our admin. There is only one message template that is used for all subscription expirations. So that is the correct message that you should get from us when your custom title is about to expire.
It doesn’t look like a phishing attempt to me.
Thanks, everyone.
I had a similar question just two months ago.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=873715