Ask Paul: September 5 ⭐

Happy Friday! We're in Berlin, Germany for a few more days and while I'm not sure if I deserve a break, I will try to enjoy a little downtime before coming back to reality. But first...
?‍♂️ A quick note on membership transitions
As I'm sure most of you know, we announced some changes to the memberships we offer at Thurrott.com last week and it went about as well as I expected. Which is to say, not very well at all. Some Alpha members saw a pop-up on the site before we were ready to go live, our mistake, and dozens of them clicked through and inadvertently downgraded their accounts to Thurrott Lite. We tried to fix that through a complex series of  coupon codes that were tied to the timing of those members normal renewal timeframes, but the codes timed out after just a few days and so those who waited a bit longer discovered their code had expired. Those who successfully made the transition, so to speak, discovered they had lost their alpha status (or at least badge). At least one person who paid for Thurrott Lite was still seeing ads. And another was getting a weird comments display that I actually can't explain, though that seems to have resolved itself, at least.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry for how this happened. I'm sorry for when it happened, if only selfishly because I had to fly to Germany on Monday, didn't sleep a wink during the overnight flight, and then spent the next two days in a dizzy haze. I'm sorry that I didn't communicate this better. And I'm sorry this wasn't done better on the backend.

I'm still in Germany and will fly home on Sunday, thankfully during the day. And then we'll be home for about 10 days before we head back to Mexico. But somehow, during this trip and then more easily when I get home, I'll try to sort through this mess and set things right.

I've already started some of that work. But part of it is explaining more clearly what's happening. As Robert (who did all the hard work behind the scenes to make this possible) told me the other day, it's obvious that many readers assumed that what I described as a transition would in fact be, wait for it, a transition. But for reasons that I now try to make clear, it's a little more complicated than that.

Without belaboring the point, we had (and still have) this old, complicated WooCommerce-based system for managing memberships and subscriptions, two things I see as being one thing, that is so broken I want to scream. And we're replacing it with a much simpler membership system that is self-service, meaning that you as a member can manage it easily yourself by quitting, downgrading, or upgrading at any time, and using (what Robert calls) a "single point of truth" for managing how you pay. Once we do move fully over to this new system, things should work much better for everyone. But in the meantime, it's a mess. And the underlying cause for that is the payment systems.

I'm not sure whether this is obvious on the outside, but let me state plainly that I...