[TigerLily]

I have started the transition on my site to paid memberships, and surprisingly, it's gone quite well! It's strange, but it seems that people appreciate communities more when they know they have to pay for them or they'll cease to exist.

I announced the changes on my site right before Christmas and expected to get a LOT of backlash about it, but haven't had hardly any negative comments. The members have been very understanding. Their reaction was not only "Yes, we're willing to pay" but also "Let me send in an extra payment for someone who can't afford to stay." It's been a pretty amazing experience!

I hadn't planned on taking any membership fees until mid-January, but have already been inundated with payments, and the members have 4 more weeks to get them in! To say I'm overwhelmed is an understatement!

I'm running into some problems with the amount of time it takes to process these payments and send out receipts. I'm wondering if anyone has done this or has ideas on these two issues:

1) Automating payments with vbulletin - I'd love to automate it with PayPal, but have read all of the manuals and am not sure how to integrate their subscription service with vbulletin- the subscription forms don't allow for passing a username variable (unless generated randomly by PayPal). This is a problem for existing members wanting to pay that way- unless they already have PayPal and add their username to the notes area, I have to match up email addresses, and even then sometimes their registered address at my site is different from their PayPal email address. (I also allow people to pay by check, those just take longer, oh well!)

2) Emailing new profile field info in receipts to users in paid members group- I'm wondering also if anyone knows how to add new variables to the email scripts so that I can sort the members who have paid and email (and maybe even PM) their receipts to them, automatically including what type of membership they bought (I'm offering 3 kinds- yearly, 6 months and quarterly), what they paid, and when their subscription expires, plus any notes about their payment.

On the two tiered membership- I decided to handle it by moving everyone who pays to a new paid members group, and turning off the privileges for the "registered" group on Feb 1st. They will be able to view the boards for a while, but not post, until I figure out how I want to do things like free trial memberships, etc. Not sure how to expire an account after two weeks.

If anyone has ideas or questions on how I'm handling this as I'm implementing it, I'm happy to help and would love help from others. I wish I knew more php! I can add hacks with no problem and tweak things just fine, but writing new code throws me for a loop right now. Time to crack open some books I guess!

Thanks a bunch,
Kim

PS I had posted earlier in this thread that we were trying to stay out of the red till the end of the year. We made it up to December, and then I had to pay for server costs out of my pocket during Christmas! That was the galvanizing factor for the changes, and now I'm glad I had that push to make the tough choice of going with memberships. It was a huge relief and I have no regrets about it.