New and Improved GPWA Times Magazine Subscription Process

[MichaelCorfman]

Today we’ve completely revamped the way members subscribe to the GPWA Times Magazine.

Historically, we defined a few private fields within the vBulletin forum software that members could use to provide us with their mailing address. While this worked, it was pretty cumbersome, and it made it impossible for us to implement improvements in the way we handle magazine subscriptions.

Now, when you are logged into the GPWA website, you will see a new option under the “My Account” top navigation item titled “My Magazine Subscription.”

This new facility to manage your magazine subscription mailing address incorporates a number of significant improvements. Some of the more important changes include:

• A complete history of past changes, when they were made, and whether you or a particular GPWA staff member made each change, can now be displayed using the new “Display Update History” button on the bottom of the page.
• Previously, when vBulletin was used by members to provide their mailing addresses, we had to manually migrate the changes to our actual subscription mailing address database, so historically all addresses were officially made by GPWA staff members. Now, when you make updates, they will be made directly to our subscription mailing address database (although GPWA staff members will still validate them for reasonableness and make changes when appropriate).
• We’ve implemented pull-down menus for countries, and other major geographic areas within countries, such as states or provinces, in order to eliminate inconsistencies and spelling errors when this information is entered.
• We’ve added new optional fields such as company name and title that you can use as part of your address.
• We’ve added the ability to attach a note to an address update. In the future, we will use the notes to document update actions we take such as handling change of address notifications provided to us by the postal service, or correction of postal codes.

Behind the scenes, we made some pretty significant changes to support this new approach. If you observe any glitches, please let us know, and we'll make sure they are fixed right away.

Michael