Membership Renewal

Tuesday, 17 October 2006

The “renewal” process for Daring Fireball members was, prior to about five minutes ago, pretty confusing. It wasn’t actually possible to extend an existing membership; what you needed to do was sign up for a new membership, even if you were using the same email address. The explanation for this is simply that I was lazy when I first cobbled the membership system together back in 2004.

It was a problem, though, because a new membership means you got a new membership key. And since the key is your password for the members-only RSS feeds, it meant you had to update all your subscriptions and Keychain entries. This was both confusing and a pain in the ass. (If you’re a member who is still getting expiration reminders after renewing, try quitting your feedreader, deleting your membership entries in Keychain Access, relaunching your feedreader, and then re-authenticating with your most recent membership key.)

Starting today, this process should be much smoother. To extend an existing membership for another year, log in using your current membership email address and key, and then just follow the instructions from there. You can also renew while buying a new t-shirt by clicking a checkbox in the order form. My apologies for letting this languish for so long. (Lesson: “good enough for now” will eventually not be good enough.)

Another problem with the previous “just sign up for a new membership when your old one is nearing expiration” scheme is that if you signed up for a new membership while there were still a few days or weeks left on your old one, you’d get shortchanged by that amount of time with your new expiration date. There are a whole slew of memberships expiring this week (thanks to last October’s membership drive), so a bunch of you who “renewed” by coughing up the dough for a new membership fall into this category.

To make this right, I’ve changed the expiration dates for everyone who has signed up for a new membership in the last six weeks to 17 October 2007.