Saturday, July 17, 2004
One-Year Subscription Anniversary and Houston, We Have Some Problems
Posted by Jason Dunn in "UPDATE" @ 08:00 PM
I knew our one year anniversary of launching the subscriber services was coming up quick, but I didn't realize it was today until I looked at my Smartphone and saw I had 76 odd email messages waiting for me - and all of them were related to subscriber services. I had a hunch the flaws in our system would come to light when the one-year anniversary happened again, and unfortunately I was right. :-(
So what was supposed to happen was this: two weeks prior to your subscription ending, our system sends you an email message informing you that your subscription is about to come to an end. Flaw number one is that I don't think we have a method of detecting which of you had the "automatically renew" box checked off or not, so we have no way of sending a custom message saying "Hey, it looks like you've set up PayPal to auto-renew, so in two weeks your subscription will be renewed", or a message saying "Hey, you've got auto-renew turned on, so if you don't want to renew, please turn that off".
We also seem to have our timing off - some of you are getting your cancellation messages after you've paid for another year, which is completely confusing you. Worse yet, it seems that some of you lifetime subscribers got charged $36 for an addition year - I'm not sure how that happened (sounds like a PayPal bug). For those of you who were renewed and didn't want to be, I'll process your refunds as soon as I can. The goal here wasn't to trick anyone into renewing - our system was supposed to inform you two weeks prior that you were going to be charged, but for some of you, it seems it did not (or the email got blocked by a spam filter - email is so unreliable nowadays!).
So I'll ask for your patience and a few ounces of grace as I sort through all of the email messages, process refunds, and sort out all the issues. Thanks for your continued support, and if you have any questions regarding your subscription, send an email to subscriber - at - thoughts media /dot/ com with your subscriber name and as much information as you can give me about when/how you paid, etc. The more information I get, the faster I can track down what happened.
On the up side, it's gratifying to see so many of you renewing your subscription - I appreciate your support! Now I think we can afford that extra RAM for our server, which it really needs. :mrgreen: We're in the process of re-tooling much of the subscriber page to make it easier for you to claim your Vaja/Sena coupons, PDAmill codes, etc.
UPDATE: I can't tell for sure yet, but it looks like we might have a problem whereby people are charged via PayPal but their subscription isn't automatically renewed. This is problem because the PayPal email confirmation that I get doesn't include your username, so I can't activate you manually. If this has happened to you please be sure to contact me so I can get it sorted out!
So what was supposed to happen was this: two weeks prior to your subscription ending, our system sends you an email message informing you that your subscription is about to come to an end. Flaw number one is that I don't think we have a method of detecting which of you had the "automatically renew" box checked off or not, so we have no way of sending a custom message saying "Hey, it looks like you've set up PayPal to auto-renew, so in two weeks your subscription will be renewed", or a message saying "Hey, you've got auto-renew turned on, so if you don't want to renew, please turn that off".
We also seem to have our timing off - some of you are getting your cancellation messages after you've paid for another year, which is completely confusing you. Worse yet, it seems that some of you lifetime subscribers got charged $36 for an addition year - I'm not sure how that happened (sounds like a PayPal bug). For those of you who were renewed and didn't want to be, I'll process your refunds as soon as I can. The goal here wasn't to trick anyone into renewing - our system was supposed to inform you two weeks prior that you were going to be charged, but for some of you, it seems it did not (or the email got blocked by a spam filter - email is so unreliable nowadays!).
So I'll ask for your patience and a few ounces of grace as I sort through all of the email messages, process refunds, and sort out all the issues. Thanks for your continued support, and if you have any questions regarding your subscription, send an email to subscriber - at - thoughts media /dot/ com with your subscriber name and as much information as you can give me about when/how you paid, etc. The more information I get, the faster I can track down what happened.
On the up side, it's gratifying to see so many of you renewing your subscription - I appreciate your support! Now I think we can afford that extra RAM for our server, which it really needs. :mrgreen: We're in the process of re-tooling much of the subscriber page to make it easier for you to claim your Vaja/Sena coupons, PDAmill codes, etc.
UPDATE: I can't tell for sure yet, but it looks like we might have a problem whereby people are charged via PayPal but their subscription isn't automatically renewed. This is problem because the PayPal email confirmation that I get doesn't include your username, so I can't activate you manually. If this has happened to you please be sure to contact me so I can get it sorted out!
