Its not like everyone thinks the Charter members are betterthan us Members. We’re all members, here! 
There probably wouldn’t be such a fuss if the title were “Old Farts” instead of “Chartered Waters” or whatever.
Note that, we hope, you will soon be able to pay a li’l extra and have a custom title, and then all animals will be equal again.
I’m not quite following you here. I guess that the SDMB did originally promise subscribers a year ago that they’d have ‘charter member’ in their title, and if they eliminated it now they’d be going back on their word, if that’s what you mean.
C K Dexter Haven, that’d be cool. Although in that scheme I presume certain words would be filtered out, like “moderator,” “admin,” “SDSAB,” and “Perfect Master.”
Shoot. I was going to have my custome title be C K Dexter Haven.
Back to the drawing board.
How about “Imperfect Master”? Maybe that should be Ed’s title. 
I’d rather not be called an “Old Fart”, I get enough of that in real life. 
Maybe those who missed the deadline and all the notices should get the title “Terminal Procrastinator”. 
In neuroman’s scenario it would be rescinded, hence the lie. If I promise you something just to get your money and then take it back, I have lied to you. I am not claiming anyone has lied, merely pointing out that referring to such a transaction as a “marketing gimmick” is obscuring its true nature.
If they promised to let people become charter members with the intent of taking it away, that would be one thing . . . but if they promised to let people who subscribed at a certain time become charter members, and then followed through on it, and then more than a year later they decided to abolish the Member/Charter Member distinction, is that a lie? I would call it something more like “changing their minds.” Maybe if they had guaranteed that the Charter Member designation would never, ever go away – but did they guarantee that? I can’t remember how it was phrased when it was initially offered . . .
If anyone wants to know why I didn’t pay mine sooner, it is because my computer got so it would not load SDMB (along with lots of other things). We went on a planned trip to South Africa and I finally took the CPU in for fixing. There are still problems but SDMB loaded and here I am having to pay $14.95. I am now testing to see if I also lost the “charter member” listing. If I did I am not one of those that says “So what, I don’t care.” I DO CARE!
I’d also be grateful if I could get “charter member” status restored. I thought I had until the end of April, but it didn’t work out that way it appears.
Thanks.
Testing to see if my ability to post has been turned on yet…
Great, now I can post again!
I can’t possibly see why the SDMB re-subscriptions were handled like this. It should be so simple: When your subscription expires, you then renew it. You should not be punished for not re-upping the subscription in advance.
This is a mistake that will cost the board members.
Excuse me? How was anyone punished? I am interested in hearing how you think this should have been handled.
I too had Charter membership, but my account lapsed without me knowing, and now I’m back to “Member” and I’d like to get back charter status if possible.
I don’t really see how this matters much. This is a minor cosmetic change your customers would like, and I think deserve. I don’t see any reason, or any good business sense in blaming the consumer for not placing SDMB at the top of its priorities when you can clearly fix the problem with little difficulty.
I don’t see this as the staff and administration of the SDMB “blaming the consumer” for anything. They warned folks a month out from the deadline. They kept putting up warnings. All over the board, at the time, there were threads started : “Are ya gonna stay??”, “Are ya gonna go??” thanks to a controversy.
It’s like a supply of pears. The supply will run out in a month’s time, because the pear seller has to leave the country. If there are notices up, all your neighbours are talking about the pears (“Are these pears really juicy enough to eat rather than Sam’s apples?”) and you didn’t get to the seller in time before he stopped selling the pears – that’s the way it goes.
The folks who missed out because they had computer outages, life-changes etc. – I hope they get satisfaction. But just to have a moan because you didn’t (a) check your profile and subscription information, or (b) didn’t take in all the broo-haha over the last few weeks – eh. That’s just the way it goes.
People who didn’t renew ahead of time were punished by having to pay double and losing thier “charter member” status.
Here’s what I said about it in the other thread:
If the process were set up like this, then it would save the mods and admins work as well. There need not be reminders posts and emails at all. Simply let people renew when their membership expires without a penalty, punishment, or whatever you prefer to call it.
I don’t mean to be snarky about it, but this was rather poorly handled. I hope that going forward the system will be improved because I want to see the number of posters on the SDMB grow, and this is the wrong way to go about doing that.
Our subscription system operates as you describe, except that we send people a renewal reminder shortly before their subscriptions expire. You seem to have confused the regular renewal process with charter membership, which was a special offer to which special rules applied. These have been abundantly explained elsewhere.
Most members are charter members. The “special rules” actually apply to the vast majority of posters, do they not?
Not so vast. I haven’t asked Jerry to do a count, but by my rough calculation, about 1,060 of our 3,185 current subscribers paid either $14.95 or $9.95 - almost exactly a third. Of that number, 180 paid after the 4/28 charter member renewal deadline had passed. I’m guessing most of the 180 are ex-CMs, whose CM status we’ve decided to reinstate. As time goes on, however, regular subscribers will constitute an increasing percentage of our user base, and probably within the next couple years will account for the majority. Regular subscribers are subject to the don’t-pay-don’t-post rule you advocate, so we expect complaints like yours to diminish.