Beta, subscriptions, spam in Site Updates (Josh)

Hey everyone,

First, I’m excited to share that the beta is open again! We’ve put a ton of work into shoring up things behind the scenes and squashing bugs, and we’d love to get your help running through the site and seeing if anything breaks or doesn’t work like you expect it to. The only thing not yet implemented is diary export.

One thing that would especially be helpful is if users with a LOT of entries (like 4,000+, i know you’re out there) would try posting a few times to see if they see an error when they post. We’re still troubleshooting a truly maddening bug we can’t seem to replicate, and that seems to be the only correlation we’re seeing. Also — have any users that meet that criteria seen any bugs like this on the main Prosebox site? We’re really pulling our hair out over here trying to replicate it and figure out what the heck is going on.

Next, I’ve been seeing a lot of mentions of people paying for subscriptions and still seeing ads. If you’re having this problem, you’ll need to update your credit card information, as the one you have entered has expired.

Total disclosure, I made a mistake a few years ago when I implemented subscriptions that allowed subscribers whose cards expired to continue getting the benefits of a subscription without getting charged. This was how things worked. For years. I didn’t catch it until recently, and because of that error quite a bit of subscription revenue was lost. Learning that.. really sucked. When I fixed the error, those of you that have expired cards in the system were unsubscribed in the system. The reason this was likely surprising is that the email notice of your card expiring probably came in years ago, which makes it a surprise.

So, all that said! I would encourage all of you (especially those seeing this issue) to update your credit card info (or switch to Paypal — we support it now!). Here’s how you do that:

First, go here:
https://www.prosebox.net/subscribe/

Click on “Manage your subscription”

Enter the email address you use for your subscription and to login to the site:

Enter the one time code sent to your email address:

Click on “Payment Methods” (yes my annual sub is weird, I’m the admin lol):

Click “edit” and update with new info:

And that’s it! If you comment here or send me an email when you’re done, I can go in and manually flip the switch for you, OR the site will automatically pick it up within 24 hours.

If you were seeing ads and getting charged (which I don’t think is possible, but maybe?), reach out to me and I’ll look into it and issue a refund if it applies.

Apologies for all of the trouble and concern, that was an embarrassing issue truthfully.

Okay finally, another issue I’ve seen users mentioning pertains to the automatic spam detection. Please remember that when you delete and create a new account, your account is VERY limited and can easily be flagged as spam for the first two weeks. I know some of you like to arbitrarily delete and re-create your account, so please keep that in mind when you’re making that decision. For any other auto-banning issues, the site should warn you very loudly before you get yourself banned, so if that’s happening to you… maybe calm it down a bit? If you think it’s a bug, reach out and we can take a look.

Okay, that’s all for now.

A boy and his lobster: