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Post by carnivine on Oct 20, 2014 11:10:05 GMT
I have been a member of the ICPS for a few years, and each year they send me an email way in advance of my renewal date stating my membership is due to expire etc etc. Their first email to me advising me to renew was sent on 28th July 2014. Why would I want to renew 3 months BEFORE my current membership expires? Their "Second Notice" was sent on 24th September 2014, still a month in advance of the expiry date!! MY MEMBERSHIP IS NOT DUE FOR RENEWAL UNTIL 24TH OCTOBER 2014 FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.
Their "Second Notice" states that unless I renew immediately, my account will be suspended!
Correct me if I'm wrong...but when I pay my ANNUAL subscription, I assume I am paying for 52 weeks of membership to the ICPS, which, in my book, includes unrestricted access to their members area on their website.
My membership is due to expire in about a week's time, and so this morning I went online to see about renewing. However, it appears that despite my CURRENT membership still being VALID, my access has been restricted. The result being....I CANT ACTUALLY RENEW MY MEMBERSHIP!!!!!
I have never been a member of any Society or club that demands you pay your new subscription BEFORE the current one runs out.
I am far from happy with the ICPS, and am now thinking twice wether it's worth renewing at all.
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Post by John Brittnacher on Oct 20, 2014 14:36:47 GMT
We are in the process of reviewing the whole set of e-mails that ClubExpress sends out. We have been using the default ClubExpress e-mails and schedules and as you have discovered the first membership renewal does come out too soon.
When you renew your membership is extended for another 52 weeks. There is no disadvantage of renewing early and we encourage you to do that. There is a disadvantage of renewing late. We do have a grace period but if the gap in your membership is just right you could miss an issue of CPN. We are also reviewing how all that works.
As far as access issues, I see nothing in your account profile indicating your membership is restricted in any way. If you are having problems, contact us at the e-mail address on the ClubExpress web site. (I hesitate to give all our addresses publicly because the spam can make it easy to miss important e-mails.) Please include specifics of what happens when you try to do something on the web site. Right now we are transitioning who is handling membership and it may take a team effort to figure out why you are having issues.
The ICPS is a total volunteer organization. We don't get paid to do this. We also, as individuals, have real lives outside the carnivorous plant universe so we can't always be on top of things here.
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Post by carnivine on Oct 20, 2014 15:28:32 GMT
Thank you for the reply.
My membership was due to expire on 24th October. I have today renewed my membership following your advice, which was:
"When you renew your membership is extended for another 52 weeks. There is no disadvantage of renewing early and we encourage you to do that." Unfortunately, following your advice, I have now lost 4 days of my membership that I paid for 2013/2014 because your website now shows my membership will expire on 20th October 2015!
I now require the ICPS to advise me where I stand as clearly your current system does not work, and I am in effect out of pocket. 4 days of lost membership may not seem much, but I am unemployed and paying out for membership that then gets over-ridden if I oay early is totally unacceptable. I have basically paid for something that I then didn't get the full service for.
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Post by hcarlton on Oct 20, 2014 15:38:53 GMT
The website will update in some time. I believe that's a manual process they have to take, and the deadline of your renewed membership will be extended to what would have been the original date had you paid on your expiration date. I regularly try to renew as soon as I get my first notice, and at first the date of my next renewal appears as having been moved back a few months, but then check back a few days later and it's returned to normal. As John said, it is a fully volunteer organization, and they are all busy people. Dealing with transactions requires patience and far more tolerance than you are giving at the moment. Everything will be worked out accordingly, it just takes time.
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Post by carnivine on Oct 20, 2014 16:33:11 GMT
In this day and age, websites that take money for subscriptions should be able to update automatically. I appreciate all posts are voluntary, but the system currently used for these subscriptions needs to be replaced with one which is far better.
As for patience and tolerance, I am patient and tolerant of most things, but where money is concerned I like to be on the ball.
Thanks for the explanation re the website updating etc. I will check back in a week or so.
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Post by John Brittnacher on Oct 20, 2014 17:00:49 GMT
This is what it says now:
Member - 1 year Exp. Date 10/24/2015 Active
I don't know what you saw that gave a wrong date. The e-mail confirmations give the transaction date. The place to check the membership expiration date is in the Member Profile. (If you did get an e-mail with the wrong expiration date, I want to see it. It means there is a wrong code in one of the e-mail templates that has been there for years.)
What can lead to confusion during the membership process is asking to renew your membership is separate from paying for your membership. The system works that way so members have the option of sending in a check or paying some other way such as Paypal. We get a lot of people who go through the membership process and never pay for it. ClubExpress doesn't update the expiration date until it gets confirmation the person paid. There can be a delay for the web site to get updated after you pay. Usually for credit card transactions it is a few minutes. Part of the reason for the delay is for security reasons the computers holding credit card information have to be isolated from the computers you actually interact with.
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Post by John Brittnacher on Oct 20, 2014 17:05:31 GMT
at first the date of my next renewal appears as having been moved back a few months, but then check back a few days later and it's returned to normal. I will take up this issue with the president of ClubExpress. Maybe they need to have some indication that the renewal is pending instead of doing it the way they do now.
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Post by carnivine on Oct 20, 2014 19:39:16 GMT
"I don't know what you saw that gave a wrong date."
I got this info direct from my profile page on the website. I can confirm the date has now been updated.
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Post by ICPS-bob on Oct 21, 2014 0:01:27 GMT
carnivine, thank you for your postings. As John said we are all volunteers and are trying to keep all of the functions of ICPS operating. Most of the "staff" are just ordinary folks that like CPs and are willing to volunteer to do some job for ICPS. Occasionally things need fixing, but unless someone lets us know about a problem, we might never know and folks will become frustrated by our incompetence. Once we become aware of a problem, we take it seriously and try to fix it.
Anyway, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
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