Limitation on total Members & Member renewal reports?

[webstuff]

Hi, we currently have S2Member pro and it's been working great for us the past year. We've now come to the point when membership renewals are due and have run into a couple of snags that I hope you can help with. I've searched the forums but didn't come across anything similar having been asked, my apologies if I missed it.

Issue 1- Does the plug-in have any limitation on the number of members it can process in one go?

Background: We currently had over 2000 regular paid members all of which had an End Of Term time set as 12/31/2011, if they didn't renew their membership by then we expected them to be automatically demoted to Subscriber level.

This seems to have worked fine for 935 of the members who had not renewed, however there were another 471 members who have the correct End Of Term time in their accounts, do not seem to have renewed (I searched paypal for a few people's info and sorted them by 'last payment date'), but are still showing as having s2member_level1 access.

Interestingly, the user IDs of these people are mostly consecutive - the ones which were not correctly demoted start at around 1500 - so I'm wondering if the plug-in has some kind of limitation on numbers of members it can handle? If not, what might have happened to prevent them from being demoted?

Issue 2- Is there any way to easily get a report of membership renewals

I need to mail out membership packets to the people who have renewed which means downloading the membership list to get their addresses and renewal date. We're still growing and currently have over 2250 lines in the database... this means that every time I want to find out who has renewed I need to download 10 separate files, merge them together, sort by status to remove non-renewed members, and sort by renewal date to find the latest people who have renewed.

Surely there's an easier way?

Thanks in advance,

Joanne

[Raam Dev]

Hi Joanne,

I don't know of any issues with large numbers of members and I know that s2Member is actively being used on sites with even larger membership numbers.

I'm going to forward this to our lead support, Cristian, and see if he can shed any light on it. Otherwise, he'll be able to escalate this to the lead developer, Jason.

Thank you for your patience!

[Raam Dev]

Hi Joanne,

For your second issue, here's a suggestion: Instead of scraping the database, you could generate the list of users using the WordPress get_users() function: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_users

I'm still waiting on a response from our lead developer on your first issue. Thank you for your patience.

[webstuff]

Hi Joanne,

For your second issue, here's a suggestion: Instead of scraping the database, you could generate the list of users using the WordPress get_users() function: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_users

I'm still waiting on a response from our lead developer on your first issue. Thank you for your patience.

Thanks Raam,

The second issue is probably the most critical, as updating our mailing list to be able to send new membership cards is currently a very time consuming task.

I'm not a programmer so although I can do something basic like making get_users pull a list of names, it would take me forever to figure out the right fields to pull member's addresses and last payment date in a format I can transfer easily to excel.

How do other membership sites manage this kind of thing? It would seem that a list of members which have renewed would be a pretty basic requirement - or do most not need to know addresses in order to mail things?

[Raam Dev]

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do. Are you sending "membership packets" via email?

[webstuff]

No, it's a membership card and other items by snail-mail. We collect the member's address in custom fields because the billing address for paypal/credit card is not always the same as the shipping address. We also offer gift memberships via paypal gift certificates so no address is entered until the member actually signs up using the gift card. We needed a dump of the member info so we can create mailing labels, and because people are joining/renewing continually, and their user ID could be anywhere from 1-2400 we have been downloading 10 separate files to find the changes. Having said that, we now think we've figured out a workaround via some custom programming.

I also need to do a to weekly cross-check of email addresses against mailchimp as not all new members seem to get added to the list - and at the moment email updates don't seem to be synced between the 2 systems, is that right? so if a member goes in and manually changes their email address, it's not sent to Mailchimp because a status update hasn't happened - or am I not understanding that correctly?

Would still like to know what might have happened to disrupt the auto-demoting of members on their EOT date though - we want to try avoid it or know what to look out for next year!

[Raam Dev]

Custom programming will be the only way to achieve a custom report like you described, so I think you're on the right path with that.

The cross-check of email addresses would need to be done the same way, by custom coding something. MailChimp -> s2Member integration is not supported by s2Member, but it has been attempted with some success (see here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10289). You might be able to ensure that any changes on MailChimp get synced over to s2Member.

To ensure changes to an email address on s2Member profiles are synced to MailChimp, you'd need to write a custom routine that ties into a s2Member Member Profile Hook and runs the necessary code to interface with the MailChimp API to make the updates.

Finally, any problem with auto-demoting of members will need to be solved by paying close attention to the logs and tracing activity to figure out where things might have gone wrong.