As far as I am aware, there is no billing page for the SDMB set up under Discourse. The old system from vBulletin did not port over.
On vBulletin it used to be a link in the user control panel. It was not in the same place where you signed up to be a member.
Information I remember about the old system that I didn’t see mentioned in this thread:
Charter Members paid half price as long as they kept up their payments. And there were occasional forgiveness drives where you could pay extra if your Charter Member status had lapsed, and get back that sweet deal.
Member and Charter Members got benefits like not seeing ads, as well as the ability to make new threads (aka topics) in the Marketplace forum (aka category).
The system used Paypal to handle everything. If you didn’t have a Paypal account, it would use their one-time payment system with a credit card. (I appreciate any system that at least allows Paypal.)
Users were allowed to sponsor another user by paying for their membership. (I think it’s possible only paid members could do this. And I can’t remember if Charter Members paid full price or not.) This happened to me twice.
I don’t think the system was completely automated. But it would nice if it would be here.
Was the ability to charge for membership not looked at before the transfer was made?
We knew that the subscription system would not port over before the move. I know that TubaDiva was starting to look into it before she passed, but I don’t know if any real progress had been made by that point or not. She had a lot on her plate. There was a lot of stuff going on at the same time.
If you can connect us with the right person, I’d be happy to push Straight Dope subscriptions near the top of our priority list at Discourse @engineer_comp_geek
(dang meant to edit this in but got distracted, so we get two posts)
To be clear, the actual subscription money would need to be collected by Chicago Sun-Times. Discourse does not do any kind of user subscription money collection, ala Patreon. Can you (or anyone reading this, really) point out the old webpage where someone would sign up for a Straight Dope subscription, even as a wayback machine artifact?
What I’m trying to say is, the infra to bill, enter a credit card (or what have you), and manage your subscription is not something Discourse, the software, does. All we do is honor the API request to add a user to a group, based on their status in an external billing and subscription system.
Let’s take this to a private discussion.