Hi,
I read several forum posts around membership expiration and page protection but just wanted to list few issues even with the solutions that were offered for the following scenario:
• There are only two membership levels; free and paid
• Paid membership is valid for one year only
• Members want to be able to manually renew club membership and not use “subscription”
• When one year membership expires, it should go back to free membership that allows members to login, change profile if needed and renew their membership for the following year if they choose to
Issues with suggested solutions in various forum posts
1. Use “enable secondary membership” with option to automatically degrade to free membership when paid expires – this works fine expect the fact that with this option, member has both membership levels assigned (free #2 and paid #3) all the time even after paid membership expires. In this case, a partial page protection does not work properly at all. If there is a conditional protection like [emember_protected not_for=3] (to show page that is only for free members, typically used to show payment buttons for renewal), it will not work because even when membership expires (level 3), member still has level 3 assigned and when above condition is checked, eMember does not show the message that is mean to be shown to non level 3 (level 2 i.e. free) members. If I change it to [emember_protected for=2], same issue exists since “protected” message (message meant only for free members) is shown when members are at level 3 (paid membership).
2. Use “allow expired members to login” option without enabling secondary membership. In this case, when membership expires, member stays at the previous level (paid, level #3) and page protection is all messed up again. Since I want to use the same page for renewal as well as for initial payment when somebody just joins the club, I wanted to show a payment button as if user was at level #2 (free user who just registered and he/she is about to login and make a payment). However, since expired user is staying at level #3, I cannot use any of the protection mechanisms other than the one that checks if user is logged in or not.
Questions:
• What is the solution to the problem? Having two separate payment pages for joining (initial payment) and for renewal? There is a way to setup that but, in your setup comments, you are saying that “You can simply use the same page as the "Membership Payment/Join Page". I want to do exactly that!
• Is it possible to automatically degrade any expired level to a free level in case if free level is setup to never expire? Should that be a logical way to deal with expired paid memberships? I know that you have a setup like this but it does messes up protection function as I mentioned in item #1 above
Any help is appreciated.