If I make changes in the back end to the subscriptions - does it possibly effect subscriptions that already exist?
Depends on what you change. Price and Duration, no, but various protections like By URL Part, yes.
Allow Free Registered Users (without subscriptions): no (should I change this to YES???) and then remove the 'Free membership Subscription' - this may be route of problem.
Depends on your needs. If you're not protecting anything with the free plan or you don't care if users are registered without a subscription (since you've free content) then yes I suggest just allowing free subscriptions.
I just need to confirm that Allowing Free Registered Users - does allow the user to all free content, i.e., their profile and photo gallery, but they just will not have a subscription name or will it say Free Registered Member?
Yes, they'd be just a normal registered user as if CBSubs doesn't exist. They won't be able to access subscriber content until they subscribe to one of your plans.
I created a Free Membership subscription because I thought I needed this in order to capture an account for each member which would provide them access to Profiles, etc. but not to the certain content but maybe now we do not - if we just change 'Allow free registeres users to 'yes'.
Doesn't sound like you need the free membership plan in that case. I suggest disabling it and allowing free registrations without a subscription.
So I have ended up with many users showing a 'blank' subscription and even if I go into the admin and look at it I can't do anything to fix it. What is best way to re-enter the missing pieces? and what possibly causes some users to have this problem. My manager is ready to ditch this for different software but I would prefer to fix.
Only reason I can think of that happening is someone is creating users through Joomla user management instead of CB user management or you've a 3rd party extension that allows registration that's bypassing CB/CBSubs. Another case is CB Connect, which directly registers through API and bypasses CBSubs. All those cases would result in users not having a subscription. Another reason could be they have yet to confirm their email or be approved by a moderator. You should be able to edit the users in CB > User Management and give them a subscription if it's actually missing (ensure your plan allows upgrades or you won't see it there).
I had to end up removing the requirement for user to have to confirm their email address during registration because too many of these confirmation emails are blocked by provider or they would go straight to user's spam email and user never receives/or sees it, so their account is left in limbo. But even with this, we are lucky if two thirds of the users can successfully complete registration
That's just common email server spam protection. You should reword your emails and ensure they don't have any spam red flags. I recommend checking GMail standards for this as they're very strict and could give some good advice as to how to structure your emails. Nothing CB can really do about this though.
Is this normal?
Yeah, it's pretty normal. The more popular your site gets the more likely it is you'll be flagged as spam at some point. Only way to be unflagged is to contact the major providers. Yahoo is pretty easy going in this regard, but GMail it's significantly more complicated (took us over a year). The workaround to prevent GMail spam blocked is to use GMail SMTP to send your emails; that generally seams to work well, but no idea for how long.
Reviewing your screenshots on the last one it looks like Access Group isn't set. Edit your plans and on the Access tab ensure "Visible for Group (and above this group)" is set to "Public".
krileon
