Off-topic, sorta:
I know a lot of people are averse to using PayPal to subscribe to the site (personally, I trust them but use them mostly for EBay), and I'm looking into an additional provider to go along with PayPal.
Anyone have any positives or negatives about VeriSign?
I prefer to use outside providers (like VeriSign and PayPal) for credit card transactions so the site doesn't ever have that info (see Gary Dobry's recent failed attempt to subpoena precisely that info from SI) but if people wanted the whole process to stay completely in-house, I've written that software before and could do it again. Just rather not.
If I don't hear anything real dire about VeriSign, I'm going to continue down that path. Once I've got them set up, subscriptions (from both them and PayPal) will become a completely automated process rather than having to wait for Matt to see the transaction and do the necessary account changes here.
On a similar note, I'm going to make a monthly subscription option available (lifetime subscriptions won't be offered forever). I know that nobody who can reply here is affected by this, since you have to be grandfathered or a Subscriber to post here, but put yourself in the new users' shoes for this question: Is an automatic monthly renewal (until cancellation by the user) a desirable enough option that I should go through the effort to implement it? Personally, I'd prefer to have the system PM each user a few days prior to the subscription's expiration and just expire the account if they haven't renewed it. And if someone gets tired of renewing every month, they can just buy an annual subscription (or a lifetime one while they're available).
Thoughts?
