As you may have noticed already, we experienced a bug in our new billing system during the past week. Some of you were triple charged for your recurring donation associated with the VDARE Quarterly magazine. I spent most of the last 48 hours working to resolve this problem and it is now fixed.
This was not a security or hacking issue. All of your private information remains secure.
For those of you that are interested in the details, here’s what happened:
Back in August, PayPal, our credit card processor, suspended our accounts without warning or explanation. We were left in the lurch, especially when it came to our recurring donations, which were all charged automatically by PayPal. We scrambled to switch to an alternative processor, and I have been working ever since to reestablish our VDARE Quarterly subscription list along with our other recurring donations. We are still missing a big chunk of them and our monthly donation numbers are still cripplingly low.
This crisis happened in the midst of another long-term and resource-intensive project that our tech team has been working on for close to two years — moving VDARE.com away from WordPress and developing a much more sophisticated functionality on the website: a shopping card, member profiles and libraries, a Book Club, visual media center, and more.
Shifting our efforts from one payment processor to another midstream was not easy. But we did it, and with a level of agility that made me proud (if stressed).
Unfortunately, however, about a month ago, as we ran some tests and migrated data to the soon-to-be-deployed new system, a detail about the new payment processor was inadvertently overlooked, and those of you signed up for the VDARE Quarterly were suddenly signed up in triplicate. To make matters worse, the email receipts were not clear and the charges seemed completely out of the blue. I didn’t discover the issue until I started receiving anxious emails from understandably confused donors.
All excess subscriptions have since been deleted and all excess donations have been fully refunded.
Please accept my deepest apologies for the confusion. If you have any questions, please email me directly at [email protected].
Yours,
Lydia Brimelow
Advancement Officer
VDARE Foundation
VDARE.com is funded through donations from readers like you. All donations are tax deductible. Donate today at www.vdare.com/contribute.
