MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

The start of the MotoGP season is often the point at which MotoMatters.com site supporters choose to either take out or renew their subscriptions. Your support is immensely appreciated, and make possible the continuing existence of the site, and allow me to produce the content you (hopefully) love.

But over the past week or so, I have received a number of emails from subscribers asking why they can't view subscriber content. The reason for that is because their subscriptions have expired.

The background

In 2023, the subscription renewal cycle has an extra complication. As I explained when the new and upgraded site went live, and in an email to existing subscribers, as part of the migration to the new system, I had to transfer subscriptions from the old site to the new site. I did this by manually* recreating the existing subscriptions, then adjusting them to reflect the expiry date from the old system. I took the original purchase date, then added 6 weeks to the end of the year duration of a normal subscription.

The confusion

Here's where the confusion sets in. As a result of manually creating the subscriptions, emails were sent out to all existing subscribers saying they had placed a new order for a subscription. In fact they had not, and neither credit cards nor PayPal accounts had been charged. These emails all went out on February 4th or 5th (2023-02-04 or 2023-02-05).

I followed those emails up with a separate email, reproduced below. If you were a subscriber at the time of the new site upgrade, you should have this email in your inbox somewhere.

What this means in practice

If you are a subscriber, and you go to your profile page (click on My Account at the top of the page), you should see a tab called Orders. If you click on that, you will see the order created by me to transfer your old subscription to the new site. If you have bought a new subscription since then, you will see both the new and the old subscription.

The table has 2 columns: Order Number, and Order Details.

In the left hand column, in the middle, you will find the order number (where the orange line is in the photo). In the right hand column, you will find all the details of the order. The most important information is at the bottom of the page, where you can see dates with labels including Created, Granted, and Expires.

For subscriptions which were transferred from the old site to the new site, Created will always be either 04/02/2023 or 05/02/2023 (February 4th or 5th), which is when the transfer of subscriptions took place.

Expires (highlighted in yellow in the image) is the date (in European notation dd/mm/yyyy, the default in the website) of when the subscription runs out. This is the date I calculated based on the subscription in the old site, with 6 weeks added on as a courtesy.

Obviously, if the date is in the past, then it means your subscription has expired. If you wish to continue supporting the site and reading exclusive subscriber content, you will need to take out a new subscription. We currently offer three variations:

• An annual subscription which does not renew automatically. This is identical to the subscription you purchased on the old site.
• An annual subscription which renews automatically. If you are happy with the content provided by MotoMatters.com, and are willing to renew automatically. You will have to cancel this manually.
• A monthly subscription which renews automatically. As above, but it only lasts a month. If you wish to take out a trial subscription, or read a few specific articles.

If you think you did take out a subscription some time after February 5th, or you believe your subscription should be valid, please check your bank/credit card statement or Paypal account to locate the payment, and then email sales@motomatters.com.

If you have any further questions about this, please email me on sales@motomatters.com, and I will do what I can to help. If you are not sure whether your subscription has expired, go to one of your comments and see if you can see the Site Supporter badge: . If not, then your subscription has expired. I am currently working on a way of displaying this badge in the header, so that you can see at a glance if your subscription is still valid.

Here's the email sent out to subscribers on February 5th, 2023.

Dear MotoMatters.com Subscriber,

First of all, thanks so much for subscribing to MotoMatters.com. Subscribers have been the lifeblood of the site and the bedrock it is built on for nearly a decade.

Secondly, thanks for your patience in waiting while the the website was being rebuilt.

Which brings me to my third point:

Yesterday or this morning, you will have received an email with the subject:

Order #??? confirmed

Telling you that you had placed an order for a subscription to MotoMatters.com. This was sent in error during the migration process. I did not take into account that programmatically creating new orders would automatically send out new order confirmation emails. I should have disabled that step.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: You were NOT charged at any point in this process, nor will you be.

This was a process circumventing the payment process, so no money was involved. Just an update of the database to transfer your subscriptions from the old site to the new site.

My sincere apologies for the inconvenience, and any concern or worry this email may have caused you. And once again, you were not and will not be charged for this.

The new subscriptions are set not to autorenew. That will continue to be the default for subscriptions, but over the next month or so, I will be creating an autorenew subscription for those who wish to purchase one.

The good news is that this means that the new site is very close to being finished. It should be back up and running at some point on Sunday afternoon European time. It may already be up and running by the time you read this. On Tuesday, I fly to the Sepang MotoGP test to dive right back into writing about MotoGP, and concentrate on that once again.

Thanks again for supporting the website!

Cheers,

David Emmett

* "manually" is not quite accurate: the subscriptions were created using an automated process. There are (fortunately) too many subscriptions to do them all by hand.