Few questions about paid subscriptions

[estyles]

Hi,

A website that I currently administer has been using vBulletin as their forum software for a while now. They have an area on the forums that users have to pay to access. They did not know that vBulletin could handle paid subscriptions, so they had been handling all the payments manually - ie, people will contact the website owners telling them they would like to sign up, website owners would send a PayPal link to pay on, user would pay, then the website owner would add their forum account to the usergroup to see the hidden forums.

If I enable the vBulletin paid subscriptions, am I right in assuming that it will just present a link or similar on the forums, users can click on the link and be taken to PayPal to pay, and then once they have paid they will be added to the special usergroup to see the hidden forums? Is this all automated, or is input needed somewhere from the website owners?

The payment required for the website is a yearly one. If a user pays, what happens towards the end of their year; do they receive reminder e-mails automatically, and if they do not pay in time their access to the hidden forums will be cut off?

Also, if we enable subscriptions, what would happen to the users who have already paid and are in the special usergroup? Just because they are in the special usergroup, does it mean they will automatically be added to the subscription manager? Or can you place normal users in a certain usergroup will other users who have paid to get in there without problems?

There are currently about 300 members in the special usergroup, as their yearly subscription runs out, we would like to move them over to vBulletin's automated system. Is this as simple as asking them to use vBulletin's link to pay for the subscription when their next renewal comes up?


Thanks

[limey]

I'm also in this same boat. However, I've tested the paid forum and it must be a permission issue because users have access to it.

Is there anywhere online that has a good step by step tutorial? I've been looking all over for 2 days.

Do we still need to enter an IPN url or is that just old now?

[Kirk Y]

Users purchase subscriptions through their UserCP. A "Forum Link" can be added to the Special Forum that will take the User to his/her UserCP to purchase a subscription.

When you're creating the subscription you can choose which Usergroup the user is to be added to upon subscribing. But you're also given an option to grant the user access to a specific forum; you can choose whichever route you want to go.

You can mark a payment as "recurring", which will automatically renew the user's subscription when it runs out. Otherwise, they'll just have to go back into their UserCP and renew their subscription.

You can place normal users in the Special Usergroup without being affected, yes.

Whenever your current users' subscription runs out, just ask them to renew by going to their UserCP.

[estyles]

Thanks

[Kirk Y]

Most welcome.

[Cebby]

I have a little different situation.

i know how the Paid Subsc. feature works and use it on a couple of my sites. One thing that would be helpful is the ability for users to make a 1 time donation that will change their usergroup and not expire. Right now as a work around, I just put "30 years" in the duration, but this is confusing to people.

Is there a hack that does this - I haven't found one if there is...