Greetings everyone. Due to some glitch I have yet to untangle, some of my new subscribers are being charged the original old rate ($29.99/mo) rather than the correct, current rate ($7.77/mo).
I do not know why this is or what caused it, and I am extremely sorry about this happening. So far it looks like it has affected about half a dozen newly paid subs. I am not 100% on that figure because there’s a delay between the time I get a sub notification and the time my dashboard stats refresh. It probably has something to do with the time it takes for a credit card charge to post completely, clearing the bank.
If I don’t have an affirmative answer for fixing the overcharge through Substack by the end of the week I’m going to manually refund each overcharged subscription the difference and hope that doesn’t mess up anyone’s access. (And I’ll keep trying more solutions until I get to one that makes my readers whole. I will hand out complimentary months as needed to ensure this.)
Now, my guess as to what might be at the root of this, is that it appears to be affecting people who first subscribed at the old rate, dropped to free at some point, and then resubscribed this month. (Which, by the way, it doesn’t bother me at all if my readers have to un-sub and re-sub from time to time. I know life gets in the way and folks don’t always have time to read, and I’m happy to have you back later when you have time to enjoy the material. The discount for annual subs is partly an acknowledgment of this, that your busy time may fluctuate — definitely a hard truth for anyone operating a game store.) If the problem truly is tied to the re-sub email or webtags, this would suggest some embarrassingly bad coding on Substack’s part, so it’s probably something else, but until I can rule it out, that’s my working hypothesis.
The positive takeaway if this ends up being the reason, is that the solution is pretty easy. I can refund the overcharge, let the reader know to unsubscribe for end-of-month, (it keeps you live for the full 30 days even after you cancel), and then as long as they resubscribe after it expires using the main page link instead of an email prompt, it should correctly reset the price to $7.77, and then you’re off and running.
If you think this may have affected you, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I am aware of some readers that have been affected but it’s possible I do not know about all of you until I check your account log, and I don’t typically go poking around in people’s business unless they ask me to. (And the Substack account logs just show activity history on LGSNI, not what else you’re reading or subscribed to, so don’t worry about that.)
Now on to some other housekeeping:
This week I’m spending most of my time moving to my new house. It’s building prep and early/fragile bring-overs for now and then it will be truck time this weekend for the heavies and durables, and finally some amount of settling in and getting situated. I do still expect to get this week’s article set up.
Thursday we’ll have the next freebie Throwback article from the Backstage Pass. I didn’t do post-mortems for Ravnica Allegiance, War of the Spark, or Core 2020, and I don’t want to skip all the way to Throne of Eldraine yet, so it will either be an adaptation article or something else from the archive.
Tuesday, Thursday, or Friday, I have a paid article coming up that’s almost done and I think it’s going to spark some controversy. I will be discussing the worst product in the hobby/comic/video/game industry. A product so bad that the seller has to give you other stuff in order to coax you to take it. And, this product is also bad for the seller, yet there are more than a few game stores that are offering it, and their numbers continue to grow. Do I have your curiosity yet? I learned about a product that’s basically just as bad in another industry, and I get to explain that first, and then the analogue to our industry should become clear.
Today, Wednesday, and Saturday-Sunday are the days my wife Hannah is off work from her critical-care duties at the ICU, so we’re going to be focused on lugging cubic meters of stuff from our Scottsdale Airbnb to our new Gilbert house. I probably won’t have so much as half an hour of downtime in front of my iMac so there isn’t likely to be any new material on those days (other than this article).
Next week I should be more or less back on track at the new house. Monday’s Meditation may not be up until later in the day, but aside from that, I expect to be resuming a normal workload.
Thanks all, have a great week!