Chances are, your membership subscription was setup as an automatically recurring payment on a yearly basis through PayPal, unless you paid for it at a meeting via cash or check. However, it's come to our attention that some of these recurring payment subscriptions were interrupted without the user even knowing. We're not certain as to why or how this has happened, but the fact remains that we needed to investigate the situation.
Upon initial checks, our records indicate that a large portion of subscriptions have not been renewed over the past year or two. While some of those may be legitimate cancellations, we wanted to make sure we knew exactly which overdue accounts needed further action. We need to do this now so that this won't be an ongoing issue. Also, in order to protect our members from possible embarrassment we decided we would not post the list of members with outstanding dues. However, if you would like to check if your membership is up to date, you can do several things:
1. First off, if you didn't receive a new membership card in the mail in the last year, chances are you don't have a recurring subscription and you're not current on your membership fees. If you don't remember how long ago you received your latest card, take a look at it and you will see an expiration date in the bottom left corner. Of course there can be other reasons for not receiveing your new card (we might have a wrong or old address for you, it may have gotten lost in the mail, or perhaps it was just an oversight or clerical error on our part) so if you have a membership card that expired (or you don't have one at all) then do #2 below.
2. Secondly, check your paypal account to see if you still have an "active" subscription with us. I'll give you instructions to check this:
3. Lastly, if you don't have an "active" subscription going with PayPal and/or you paid initially via a different method, then please PM me to verify if your paid membership is current. I'll check our records to see when your last payment was received. There are far too many for me to do this for every one, so please do the self checks above before asking me to check it for you.
Now, in addition to the unknown PayPal issue, the members' forum accounts are not tied to the automatic payments. So, when the recurring subscription payments failed to go through, there was a situation where unpaid accounts remained as paid "Members". Therefore, we compared our records of payments with the list of forum account titles on the website. It seems there are a large portion that were once upgraded to paid "Member" titles (giving them access to all the members only forums) but should actually have been downgraded to "Registered User" status upon expiration of their last subscription.
Therefore, we have a large task ahead of us to manually compare both lists to see which accounts will need to get downgraded.
In order to give our members a chance to correct this on their own, and hopefully at the same time reduce the number of accounts that will need to be corrected on our end... we will delay making any changes for 1 week.
On Friday morning, February 28, 2013, we will begin the manual account corrections. At that time, if you're account was one that was not paid up to date, you will get downgraded to "Registered User" status and you will immediately lose access to all the members only forums. That means you will lose the ability to access the following forums:
The goal is to have the corrections completed prior to the start of the elections since it would be unfair for an unpaid member to cast a vote.
If you have any questions or need any help working through this, please contact me and I'll see what I can do to help.
Upon initial checks, our records indicate that a large portion of subscriptions have not been renewed over the past year or two. While some of those may be legitimate cancellations, we wanted to make sure we knew exactly which overdue accounts needed further action. We need to do this now so that this won't be an ongoing issue. Also, in order to protect our members from possible embarrassment we decided we would not post the list of members with outstanding dues. However, if you would like to check if your membership is up to date, you can do several things:
1. First off, if you didn't receive a new membership card in the mail in the last year, chances are you don't have a recurring subscription and you're not current on your membership fees. If you don't remember how long ago you received your latest card, take a look at it and you will see an expiration date in the bottom left corner. Of course there can be other reasons for not receiveing your new card (we might have a wrong or old address for you, it may have gotten lost in the mail, or perhaps it was just an oversight or clerical error on our part) so if you have a membership card that expired (or you don't have one at all) then do #2 below.
2. Secondly, check your paypal account to see if you still have an "active" subscription with us. I'll give you instructions to check this:
- 1. Login to paypal
- 2. Under "My Account" click on the "History" tab/link
- 3. Click on "All Activity"
- 4. You will see date range boxes. Click on the first one and select a date that's before you signed up for the club. You can leave the second one as today's date.
- 5. Click on the orange "Show" button.
- 6. Look through your history for one that says "Active" under the "Payment Status" column. You should have one there for NJ Reefers Club (paypal@njreefers.org) That will be your recurring membership subscription. If you click on "Details", it will show you your last and next payment dates. Verify whether you've made a payment in the past 12 months.
- 7. If you don't have a subscription that's Active, then chances are you had it linked to a credit card that expired or something that didn't allow the payment to go through last time, or you cancelled it or something. See #3 below.
3. Lastly, if you don't have an "active" subscription going with PayPal and/or you paid initially via a different method, then please PM me to verify if your paid membership is current. I'll check our records to see when your last payment was received. There are far too many for me to do this for every one, so please do the self checks above before asking me to check it for you.
Now, in addition to the unknown PayPal issue, the members' forum accounts are not tied to the automatic payments. So, when the recurring subscription payments failed to go through, there was a situation where unpaid accounts remained as paid "Members". Therefore, we compared our records of payments with the list of forum account titles on the website. It seems there are a large portion that were once upgraded to paid "Member" titles (giving them access to all the members only forums) but should actually have been downgraded to "Registered User" status upon expiration of their last subscription.
Therefore, we have a large task ahead of us to manually compare both lists to see which accounts will need to get downgraded.
In order to give our members a chance to correct this on their own, and hopefully at the same time reduce the number of accounts that will need to be corrected on our end... we will delay making any changes for 1 week.
On Friday morning, February 28, 2013, we will begin the manual account corrections. At that time, if you're account was one that was not paid up to date, you will get downgraded to "Registered User" status and you will immediately lose access to all the members only forums. That means you will lose the ability to access the following forums:
- 1. The Junk Yard
- 2. Networking (newly created forum)
- 3. Members General Discussion
- 4. Deals & Steals
- 5. Group Buys and Discounts (Affected accounts who are currently involved with the Feb. Premium Aquatics GB will retain temporary access to this forum only until/unless the membership payment is made.)
- 6. Member Organized Orders
- 7. Suggestions
- 8. Rock the Vote (Where the election polls will be held and also the PoTM contest)
The goal is to have the corrections completed prior to the start of the elections since it would be unfair for an unpaid member to cast a vote.
If you have any questions or need any help working through this, please contact me and I'll see what I can do to help.
