eMember account expiry time & timezone

[clearscopedesign]

Hello, can you please tell us at what time of the day account expiry occurs – is it the end of the day (i.e. 11:59 pm) on the day of the expiry date?

Also how is the timezone for this action determined? If we enable the ‘Use WordPress Timezone’ option within eMember settings, will the expiry time then be based on the timezone that is set within WordPress?

Thank you!

[wzp]

The timezone is that of whatever you’ve set the WordPress instance to, on your server. The exact time, the expiry event occurs; is based upon the WordPress cron functions, which usually means the first time “something” causes any pages of your WordPress instance to be “accessed” after midnight. The WordPress cron functions are considered to be highly inaccurate (if you need hourly granularity).

[admin]

In addition to what wzp said, the WP cron is scheduled when you activate the plugin. So the daily cronjob will be trigger roughly around that activation time every day. If your site gets traffic every hour of the day then the cronjob will trigger at that time. If your site goes without traffic many hours then you just can’t rely on the hourly granularity.

[clearscopedesign]

Ok thank you – so this is the reason that we are asking, which may not actually be related to the original question:

On May 13th one of our members received the ‘Email before the account expires’ email. We have the ‘Number of days before the account expiry when the reminder notification is sent’ set to ’10’ for that email. And then within the text of that email we of course explain to the member that their account will expire in 10 days.

10 days from the 13th (when the email was sent) would be the 23rd. However, the expiry date for that member’s account was actually the 22nd (which is only 9 days from the date that the email was sent).

Then on May 22nd the member tried to log into their account (as they understood that their expiry date was the 23rd), was unable to do so, and submitted a complaint to us about that.

So it seems like the ‘Number of days before the account expiry when the reminder notification is sent’ value may actually be 1 less than what is entered into that field?

Should we enter that value as ’11’ instead of ’10’ in order to ensure that the account does not expire before the stated timeframe?

[wzp]

So it seems like the ‘Number of days before the account expiry when the reminder notification is sent’ value may actually be 1 less than what is entered into that field?

If the member is in a UTC-xx timezone, and the server is in a UTC+xx timezone; the email client of whoever is reading the message, may come to that conclusion.

Should we enter that value as ’11’ instead of ’10’ in order to ensure that the account does not expire before the stated timeframe?

Humans, being as they are, will always try to put off paying for things until the last second. With that in mind; doing that results in a “soft grace period,” that may help.

[clearscopedesign]

Ok great we will do that, thank you!

[Author]

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