September 24 to October 11, 2024 Member Wizard Update

Apologies for missing last week's update but we were in Melbourne at the Victoria U3A Network conference where we have just been appointed their official "preferred" new membership system. (Woo hoo!).

The last couple of weeks have been taken up mainly by the Bigpond and Ozemail debacle when for no reason we were tagged as spam and blocked for all mail delivery to those email addresses. Member Wizard sends out up to 7500 emails per week and Bigpond especially is a significant email provider. The problem was exacerbated because Bigpond is the in process of being "retired" and so it appears many staff have been "reallocated". In addition they now outsource their spam filtering to what appears to be an overseas company and they are not contactable by any means other than email. It took them a week to respond to our request for them to reexamine the situation and in that time we completely rebuilt the mail system with a new email Sent From address. We have now rolled it back as they have now removed us from the blocked list but during that time little else was able to be achieved.

This however is what was what we did manage to achieve:

1. We now allow a Cost per Lesson for single day courses. This is useful if you want members to pay at the class and not generate an invoice which the Cost per Course will do. 

2. We added Gender and Country fields to those that can be imported from a spreadsheet of members.

3. We enabled the importing of a spreadsheet of Account Categories and their starting balances.

4. We are nearly finished creating a payment gateway for the Kina Bank in PNG where we have a significant number of clients. Stripe does not operated in PNG.