Paid Subscription Tweak

[Cyn]

We currently offer business advertising in signatures for a fee to our members. I would like to set this up as a paid subscription and I know how to do that. But here's the additional need that doesn't seem possible with the current features available.

I want those who have this paid subscription to be moved, upon expiration of the subscription, to another usergroup that has the signature feature disabled so that they lose their signature and must either pay to renew their subscription to get it back or contact me to be manually moved back to the registered user group that has signatures enabled.

My setup for the business signature advertising subscription places the paying member into the secondary usergroup - Business Signature Advertiser - while maintaining the primary usergroup status of Registered Member. The Registered Member group has signatures enabled.

I've studied the promotions setup and can't see a way to make it happen through that.

Thanks!!

[dune]

If registered members have signatures already, then what *business signature advertisers* are paying for is the ability to have a signature, but with "different content". It's a political rule, rather than a functional rule. That's harder to set perms for. But I think what you're saying is you want the BSA's to pay the subscription so they're allowed to post this content in their sigs, but then remove the ability to use signatures AT ALL when the sub runs out.

The problem here is that the vB perms work where the most "lenient" perms take precedence. If you drop the BSA group from a user who's sub has expired, they still have the permission to use a signature from the regular registered usergroup. You'd have to turn off sigs for regular users for that to work...

Because of this "less-than-before" move you want to make, it will be tricky. Ideally, the "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" promotion actions of the subscription system should be different. So the group(s) they are moved/added to when subscribing can be different than the groups they are moved/added to when that sub expires.

[Cyn]

That's exactly it. :) Would it be possible somehow with a promotion?

[zendiver]

Yes it is possible but not very politically correct. If REGULAR members can have signatures, and BSA's can have signatures (padi prescription to do so) and when their time has run out, and you move them to a NEW usergroup that DOES NOT allow signatures, that is where you may run into some flack from users.

[Cyn]

I simply want their signature to be wiped out at the end of their subscription so that they must contact me to be returned to the regular user group.

We make decent income from business advertising in signatures. But the headache of contacting members for renewal and policing those whose payment has expired is a burden. I can't think of another way to approach this other than what I've proposed and asked for help in doing here. Do you have an alternative that would be workable? If not can you tell me how to make this happen? :)