[plug] Membership of PLUG

[Harry McNally]

Hello

Both Dr Rob and Chris Mc have asked about their membership status so I can explain where we are with that.

Membership has several meanings at PLUG.

List membership is free and there are 350+ people subscribed. When I look at the subscribers, many are familiar names from way back in the day. Nick summed it up when he said "The list has become a bit old-guard". Including us ':-)

That has partly come about because there is password access setup on the subscribing page to thwart the spammers and their bots that would otherwise smash the open list without a barrier. Subscriber moderation became too onerous (and the spammers are damn sneaky) hence the password. It isn't easy to subscribe anymore. 

We need to use MeetUp and other tools to invite people along to events simply to explain how they can access the list management page.

Full PLUG membership is a small fee which supports the talks and events that we run in addition to similarly modest costs for equipment and some online services like AWS for the server.

There is a reminder email that you should receive when your subscription expires but; like many other subscriptions I have, these sometimes slip past.

Chris Mc asked if automatic deductions are available. They are not yet and I have no domain knowledge for how much security and other merchant hoops are necessary to implement this. If committee allows this and someone wants to step up and assist with preparing the configurations and details for this we can get that in place for 2025.

What I can do for now is ask Nick or Paul if we can generate an email that advises paid up status. Then I can email the list to advise that has been sent. It means, if you don't receive and email then you are not currently a PLUG member. If you think we have missed you, please contact committee at . 

James had done some work on other payment methods but presently, methods are described on the page:

http://plug.org.au/membership/

The membership management is manual between seeing the cash or money in the account and adjusting the membership list so give us some time to process these.

All the best
Harry
Chair, Perth Linux User Group