Membership expiration, secondary membership, partial page protection challenge

[alexmiler]

Hi,

I read several forum posts around membership expiration and page protection but just wanted to list few issues even with the solutions that were offered for the following scenario:

• There are only two membership levels; free and paid

• Paid membership is valid for one year only

• Members want to be able to manually renew club membership and not use “subscription”

• When one year membership expires, it should go back to free membership that allows members to login, change profile if needed and renew their membership for the following year if they choose to

Issues with suggested solutions in various forum posts

1. Use “enable secondary membership” with option to automatically degrade to free membership when paid expires – this works fine expect the fact that with this option, member has both membership levels assigned (free #2 and paid #3) all the time even after paid membership expires. In this case, a partial page protection does not work properly at all. If there is a conditional protection like [emember_protected not_for=3] (to show page that is only for free members, typically used to show payment buttons for renewal), it will not work because even when membership expires (level 3), member still has level 3 assigned and when above condition is checked, eMember does not show the message that is mean to be shown to non level 3 (level 2 i.e. free) members. If I change it to [emember_protected for=2], same issue exists since “protected” message (message meant only for free members) is shown when members are at level 3 (paid membership).

2. Use “allow expired members to login” option without enabling secondary membership. In this case, when membership expires, member stays at the previous level (paid, level #3) and page protection is all messed up again. Since I want to use the same page for renewal as well as for initial payment when somebody just joins the club, I wanted to show a payment button as if user was at level #2 (free user who just registered and he/she is about to login and make a payment). However, since expired user is staying at level #3, I cannot use any of the protection mechanisms other than the one that checks if user is logged in or not.

Questions:

• What is the solution to the problem? Having two separate payment pages for joining (initial payment) and for renewal? There is a way to setup that but, in your setup comments, you are saying that “You can simply use the same page as the “Membership Payment/Join Page”. I want to do exactly that!

• Is it possible to automatically degrade any expired level to a free level in case if free level is setup to never expire? Should that be a logical way to deal with expired paid memberships? I know that you have a setup like this but it does messes up protection function as I mentioned in item #1 above

Any help is appreciated.

[admin]

Given your situation, my recommendation is to use 2 different pages. Create a membership renewal page then add your membership payment buttons there. You can use the same buttons from your payment page for it. Having 2 separate pages will give you the flexibility you are looking for.

We have an addon to auto downgrade a members’s account when their account is expired. So you can use this addon too:

https://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-membership/auto-downgrade-membership-account-addon-941

There is also have a shortcode to downgrade/upgrade the member’s level. The following post has info on it:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/wp-emember-downgrade-member-level-from-premium-to-free

[alexmiler]

Thank you. The auto downgrade add-on works

[alexmiler]

Now, after using auo-downgrade function for almost a year, I have another question:

It seems that, when membership for paid users expired, they did not get downgraded to the lower level. At least, when I go the membership tab, it show that user are still at the higher (paid) level but their account state is “expired”. They do not have access to paid content (that is good) and they can re-enable their paid access by making a new payment. All is somewhat good so far. Question:

1. Is auto-downgrade plug-in supposed to make paid account expire or push the membership level to the lower level? I was expecting that all members, when membership expires, would be automatically pushed to a lower level and flagged that as such in admin tab. Why all expired members are still shown at paid membership level but with expired status?

2. From the admin tab, is there a way to do a bulk action and push selected members to a lower level?

Thanks

[admin]

Yes, you can bulk change membership level of your members. The following post has the info:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/emember-how-to-change-membership-levels-in-bulk

I have added some extra debug logging in that auto-downgrade account addon so I can see what it is doing in your site. Please download and update that addon on your site.

Also, do the following:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/re-install-or-load-a-fresh-build-of-the-plugins

Then go to emember settings and enable the debug logging option.

When you get a member expiry after that and it doesn’t auto-downgrade, let me know and I will analyze the log file.

[Author]

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