Some of my accounts expired today, and I was going to renew the subscribtion. The first thing that meets me on the subscription page is a page sying that my plan is a monthly recurring, and that it is active. It claims that my plan is active. It is not, as my account is expired.

I find no link to "renew" my subscription. It tells me either to use space points, to cancel, or to change my card. I change my card, and enter the exact same card details as I have used to subscribe with before. I get a confirmed message that my credit card details has been successfully saved. Then what? Nothing.

I go back to the subscription page, and now all of a sudden the date for the next payment has changed, and shows that I am now subscribed for a month. Dafuq? I said I wanted to change my card, I didn't type in ANY information about how long I wanted to subscribe, or if I wanted to subscribe at all.

New account, new try. This time I click "Cancel". Bageese's cute robot asks me if I really want to cancel my subscription. Of course I want to cancel it, it is expired and doesn't exist!

Oh look, now I get a message that says I have cancelled my subscription, and now I can chose different types of subscription length. I fill in the same information that I did earlier, and now I get a nice confirmation box that says thank you for the subscription and gives me a good feeling of professionalism.

So all in all, fancy new system, but does this mean the "active/inactive" indicator is broken and that all previous subscribers should cancel their accounts and start new subscriptions because it isn't possible to renew their old ones (or at least get a feeling that you are renewing them and not just getting confused)?

Thanks for taking the time to report this. I'm sorry you had a bad experience.

The reason the system would show your plan as active is that you have (or had) an expired or otherwise not-working credit card stored. Even though the card isn't being successfully billed, the system considers your rebilling plan to exist until you explicitly cancel it, even if the card hasn't been successfully charged for months or even years.

That's why changing your card would immediately bill you for one month: as soon as the system gets the new card details it thinks, "hey, a valid card, we can finally bill this guy!" and charges you for the next month as if your card had been valid all along.

Obviously though, this is not what a sane person would expect.

The site has been modified so that in future someone in your situation will see his or her subscription as an inactive "previous subscription", and they will get the buttons to choose a subscription period.

Thomas

Thanks for looking into it. And good work on the new subscription pages, they are awesome and really look professional.