[SOLVED] Users getting disabled, no obvious cause....

I recently inherited a live Joomla 2.5 with CB subs and thousands of paying customers.
It will be several weeks before I will have time or resources to set up a local DEV server with a copy of our main site for testing. It's clearly a pretty fragile setup as it is - a real spaghetti-pile of modules and plugins, all held together with duct tape, it seems.

Anyway, it seems that users are occasionally getting disabled for no logical reason - and I'm pretty sure its because we have some things cross-configured in CBsubs.

A bit of background, we have two kinds of subscription: Free and Paid Yearly.
“Allow Free Registered Users (without subscriptions):” is set to OFF, thus forcing new users to choose from one of the two subscription offers.

Several times a week I get complaints from users who can't log in.
Its almost always people who are trying to renew an expired subscription, or users who have not been on the site for some time. Often their account was originally made three years ago, and maybe not accessed for several months.

What I find when checking their accounts is always these two things:

1) subscription is set NULL (nothing there, neither Free nor Paid)
2) Account is DISABLED

I SUSPECT (but cannot confirm) that many of these events occur when a user gets a renewal notice, and tries to renew/subscribe without first logging in. Could this trigger account disabling?

I used to think that these account disable events were perhaps linked to multiple bad login attempts, but I cannot find a setting (or documentation) about this anywhere. Many of our clients have trouble remembering their passwords... BUT noting that users who until very recently HAD a free or paid subscription are now showing none at all leads me to believe its CBsubs misconfiguration of some kind.

Does this problem sound familiar? Any obvious settings for me to check?

“Allow Free Registered Users (without subscriptions):” is set to OFF, thus forcing new users to choose from one of the two subscription offers.

With this set and a user attempts to login with an expired subscription or not subscription at all it'll disable their account. This is working as intended. They'll then need to renew or subscribe to a new plan to become active again.

It's one thing to remove their subscription - but 'disable their account' means they can no longer LOG IN! And its not possible for them to 'renew' or even to subscribe to a free plan without first logging in.

(When they attempt to renew without first logging in, the system refuses their attempt - citing that the email is already in use.)

This is the area where I think we have a misconfiguration - locking out our paying users like this cannot be 'by design'...

You need to ensure the plan they are trying to renew or the plan you want them to upgrade to is publicly accessible and allows renewals or allows upgrades if it's an upgrade. They should be presented with the renewal screen on login attempt or page to select a plan.

Thanks krileon, but it appears that both those conditions are already met (see attachment).

Both plans are public,and both allow upgrades.

I get several renewals of the 1 year plan every week, (some manual, some auto) so that's working OK. It seems the users are getting locked out upon expiry only.

Having no default set should be OK, correct? My understanding is that this forces them to choose one or other other after they log in for the very first time - and (in a perfect world) also upon first login after after a paid plan had expired.

However, 'something' appears to be setting their CBuser status to 'blocked' (disabled) immediately after their paid plans expire... thus they cannot log in again!

I understand removing the "Annual" subscription from their "subscriptions" column upon expiry - but I do not see any reason for blocking their account so that they can no longer log in.

What else could I be messed up with in the settings here - that could disable their account?

Basic "global" settings are also attached below... is "allow free registered users without Subscription" set to NO correct for our configuration? (My understanding is that this is also forcing them to pick from one or the other Subscriptions...)

This is due to the "Allow Free Registered Users (without subscriptions):" parameter. Set it to "Yes" then ensure all your plans are marked as "Exclusive". CBSubs should then behave exactly as you're expecting. The purpose of that parameter and feature is to block them if they don't have an active subscription.