FAQ - Membership Upgrades

Despite our best efforts this happens too often. Because we're committed to offering free memberships our member database has to be maintained separately from the credit card upgrade member database. It's not uncommon for a monthly subcription to become out of date if the two databases get out of sync. If you think you have an upgrade but you're being prompted to upgrade click the Contact Us link at the bottom of the screen and ask us. We can check and correct any problem for you quickly.

Despite our best efforts some members continue to believe that upgrades are required. They aren't and nothing will change on your profile if the upgrade expires. We don't send reminders primarily because no matter how the email was worded those members would still feel obligated to continue thier upgrades. Additionally, even if we did send reminders out many of you would never see them because the message would go to your spam filter.

If you're upgrade has expired and you want to upgrade by check again you can email me that you will be upgrading by check and a month of upgrade will be added to your membership in advance of the payment you are sending.

The bank doesn't add any charges for depositing your payment and we rarely have problems maintaining upgrades directly from members.

The credit card service charges fees for every transaction and maintaining those memberships requires us to continually pay for programming time and administrative support that raise our costs of doing business. In addistion, every time a credit card payment is reported as fraud, the site is charged a $25 penalty.

We don't have any additional charges for checks and money orders and we almost never have a check returned for payment issues.  We'd like everyone to pay by check if that were an option and hopefully making payment by check cheaper will move more members to pay by check.