Do I have to check all the time to make sure I am paid up? Does the SDMB not send out reminders?
I paid for two more years just incase I was out.
Just had a computer crash & had to go to an old laptop to get online. Had to resign in and now I see I am a guest???
How do I get my charter membership back?
There has been an announcement on the top of every forum for the past couple weeks. Have you been off the board lately?
Considering the problem with access due to the malware scare, it makes me wonder how many members haven’t been around to see the announcement.
That, and I never browse by forum. New Posts and User CP for me. Really, they don’t send out emails?
(I’m not a Charter Member, so this is RO for me, but…REALLY?!)
The announcement does come up when you browse by New Posts as well- that’s how I read the board, too.
I am surprised by the lack of email though- although there was a thread a few weeks ago that the email server wasn’t sending out notifications, so maybe reminders got mucked up then.
I received an email a week before my membership was set to expire (i.e. this month), so they did send out emails.
I never received any emails, but I expect this to happen every spring so I check. After all, we’re Charter Members; this isn’t our first trip through this.
You might also verify the email address you have on file is your active email address.
I got snagged by that once.
Quibble: it is not “impossible” by any stretch of the imagination. Changing a user title in vB takes A) someone with admin rights B) about 1 minute. Tops.
Let’s assume there are what? 500? I’ll even give 'em 1000 charter members. One admin with an Excel spreadsheet could handle that in 20 minutes or so per week. And they’ve got like 4 people with admin rights, minimum.
They are choosing to discard a revenue source and they’re showing long-term customers how little regard they have for customer loyalty…which is fine: their businesses, their rules. But this would be trivially easy to manage and administer with a spreadsheet and a couple minutes a week, even if there’s some mysterious technical issue that prevents Jerry from making the process automatic.
Must be my browser, then, 'cause I checked again and it’s not there.
Point taken. It was a poor choice of word.
That’s odd. I’ve been reading in my iPad. I’ll check with laptop- I’m curious.
Not supporting or attacking the policy, but the user title doesn’t mean you’re a Charter Member. The billing system keeps track of charter members and that’s independent of the vBulletin system. Just restoring the text under your name isn’t addressing the problem.
I realize that–but my point was that as few charter members as there are (like I said, 1000, tops as a guess) you could keep track of the billing/titles with a simple spreadsheet, 4 admins manually changing the titles and about 10 minutes per admin per week. And that’s a worst-case scenario. It’s really not that hard. It’s not like they’re dealing with millions of charter members. Would it be a bit of a pain? Sure. If the Dope is as desperately cash-strapped as we keep hearing though, it’d probably behoove them to make the minimal effort needed and to keep it’s most hard-core base happy.
Odd, isn’t it? It’s almost as if membership was them doing you a favour, not the other way around. You’d expect them to remind you like a magazine subscription.
I *think *the point is that the SMDB admins have no connections to the billing system. So it’s not coming from the SMDB admins but from the folks who run the stuff behind the scenes. The frustration is the same, no questions there, but the target may be the wrong people.
Ah…I hadn’t considered that. But presumably Jerry would be able to send a report to Tuba, et al, that users A B & C have paid their charter membership this week–that report has to exist somewhere and forwarding it (even if a few columns with private data had to be deleted) is a minute or two’s worth of work.
And then the manual change could happen at the admin end. Again, 5 minutes a week (or month, if you only wanted to do the updates 12 times a year) for Jerry (assuming that he couldn’t automate the process), no problems with credit-card info being passed along, just a list of names of people that have paid and more apparently desperately-needed revenue (they needed the revenue badly enough to keep up sketchy malware-laden ad-servers for 4+ years, after all).
The point is that there are possible work-arounds. It’s not “impossible”, even if the process that develops is slightly clunky.
No problem–and I wasn’t going after your choice of word so much as the attitude the board has shown. It certainly seems to me that they think it’s impossible given that they’re not saying stuff like “Folks, the way we used to do the charter member thing doesn’t work any more. We’re scrambling for a solution. Give us a few weeks to work out how to get it back.” but rather saying “Suck it up, fanboys. Too much bother to take your money.”
The points made by Fenris is this thread are spot on.
If it is indeed as a different place, why can’t they send a note over to billing telling them to change it back. I bet their IT folks could to it relatively easily.
This is the first time I missed the pay time, no email nor any noticeable in my face alert that would get my attention.
If this is anyway a result of the SDMB getting flagged & they do not care who it harmed enough to make the smallest effort to fix it, that triples my need to think about what this place is worth.
Why can billing make changes on the VB but can’t make changes in their own programs?
Well, since I have paid now, ( the higher price ) I’ll be add free but I need to really think about what to do in the future. Do not care as much for the $$ saved as I want to keep my join number of 33. The charter member tag is nice but proof of when I first became a SDMB’er is actually important to me. Vain I suppose but I have been a good paying member for a long time.
That doesn’t change.