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Great news: the annual fee for Professional Appliantologist members will never increase as long as you keep your membership active. That last part is very important for reasons I’ll explain below. The annual fee for new Professional Appliantologist members has increased. This does not affect current members as long they do not allow their membership to expire. The annual fee increase is also great news for prospective new members! Huh? Why? Because it means we are still accepting new members… for now. We came very close to implementing one of two options: Close off new memberships altogether and just keep the site open for existing members as long as they wanted to remain Allow memberships only for Master Samurai Tech Academy students and alumni making Appliantology the on-going support site for the MST community. In the end we decided on a third way: keep the annual fee the same for existing members in perpetuity and still allow new members but at a higher fee. This may discourage membership but that’s okay-- our focus is on quality, not quantity. Master Samurai Tech Academy students with active enrollments(s) (i.e., still working on a course) are currently offered a 10% student discount off Professional Appliantologist membership. That will remain in effect, too. How to Prevent your current Professional Appliantologist membership from expiring An invoice will be automatically emailed to you two weeks prior to your membership expiration. If you want keep your membership at the current fee and you do not have a credit card on file, be sure to pay the invoice right away! If it expires, you’ll need to re-purchase the membership at the new, increased fee. If you’d like to mitigate the risk of your current PA membership running out because you somehow missed the renewal invoice, you can keep a credit card on file with our payment processor, Stripe. Your credit card information is not stored on our server-- it is stored securely on Stripe's server. (Stripe is our payment processor. They are lightyears ahead of Paypal in both security and features and are an Apple Pay certified partner. Their website is here.) Once your card is on file, you will get a reminder email 3 days before the payment is taken. If your card is current, you don't need to do anything and your membership will autorenew. To enter your credit card info, go to Memberships > My Details > Cards and click the yellow "Add New Card" button. Desktop membership menu: Mobile membership menu:

Appliantology has been around in one incarnation or another for over 15 years, going back to the old ApplianceGuru days. We have a lot of tech member groups that made sense at one time but don’t make sense any longer with where the site’s at today, which is just confusing to users and complicated for me to manage. So it’s time to clean house! We are going to streamline the member groups as described below. There are currently 9 tech member groups: Appliantologist - legacy honorary group Appliantology Fellow - legacy merit group based on post count Chief Appliantologist - legacy group Grand Master Funk - moderator group Master Appliantologist - honorary group Professional Appliantologist - subscribing member group Scholar of Appliantology - legacy group Senior Appliantology Fellow - honorary merit group based on post count Sublime Master of Appliantology - legacy merit group The following groups will be consolidated into a new, single group, Legacy Tech : Appliantologist Appliantology Fellow Chief Appliantologist Sublime Master of Appliantology Scholar of Appliantology The permissions and access of the new Legacy Tech group will be roughly based on the current Chief Appliantologist group. The Grand Master Funk and Master Appliantologist groups will be eliminated and those members moved to the Senior Appliantology Fellow group. In the end, the existing 9 tech member groups will be reduced to just 3: Legacy Tech - legacy member group Professional Appliantologist - subscribing member group Senior Appliantology Fellow - honorary group MUCH simpler and less confusing! The tech member group consolidation will occur sometime next week. Meanwhile, if you have any questions, let’s hear ‘em! The next step is to clean up some of the forums through consolidation and elimination. Some of the seldom-used forums will be merged into other forums or consolidated into new ones. I’ll announce details on that after the tech member consolidation is complete.