@srvvlgd, I believe that if you unblock them right after you block them then they should be able to sign back up again later. We’ve been doing that. I send an email to them warning them that we’ll be blocking them in a few days if we don’t hear back from them, but that we will then unblock them so that they can sign back up again in the future. (I explain that this is our only way to delete them from our account at this time.)
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Ah, thanks @FutilityCloset! That does seem like a good workaround! 
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So we’re now 6 months after the last post on this thread, and I’m wondering- is there any progress on this? I have a half dozen patrons that have been declining for months- a couple of them for over a year, but i know they are active viewers of my content. So I don’t want to block them, but it would be very nice if there was an option for a manual removal.
I would have hoped that a year after it was first brought up, and hearing that it’s one of the most requested add ons, that there might have been some update on it.
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Hey @sirwillow, I sadly don’t have any updates for you at this time when this feature will exist. Please know that I bring it up regularly with the product team as it’s definitely a top 10 feature request by the community.
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I’m bumping this to see if there’s any news, and also to share a situation I currently have.
My $50 tier has only two slots because the reward is labor intensive. Both slots are occupied by loyal, long-time patrons, but this tier is in super high demand. Whenever I announce that a slot is open, it’s taken in hours if not minutes.
This month, one of the patrons declined. I’ve tried all month to reach her, with no luck. I’m now only two days away from a permanent loss of $50/month. The only way I can remove this patron of 2 years is by blocking and unblocking her, which is harsh for such a long-time supporter. For all I know she could be in the hospital or something. I’ve explained in a message and email to her that blocking is the only way I can remove a pledge, but it’s still heavy-handed.
I can’t add a new slot to try to recover the $50 because if she revives her pledge in the last minute, I can’t fulfill the extra reward.
The ability to remove a patron in a less heavy-handed way is important. I really hope this becomes possible soon, though it looks like it probably won’t be in time to fix my situation. I’ll probably end up blocking and unblocking her, but this just isn’t how I want to treat my patrons in the future.
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Many of us have been asking for this feature to come back for a very long time, though you have a more pressing reason for needing it than most! This used to be a feature, and if there is a reason why it was taken away, and why they can’t reinstate it, I think it would be helpful for us to hear that. All we keep hearing is that this issue keeps being raised to the right people, but for no reason that we are told, they are not acting on it. This is the kind of thing that seems frustrating when Patreon keeps working on making all sorts of changes to things and working on adding new features, but doesn’t seem to address what seems to some of us to be basic functionality.
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If it comes back it would be nice to have a ‘‘mass delete patrons’’ option for declined pledges. Some of us has more than 50 declined pledges and deleting them one by one becomes very tedious.
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Extra frustrating when there USED to be a remove function years ago.
I dislike that people we block get a notification about it. I’m not comfortable blocking people anymore unless they actually deserve to be legit blocked (and even then it’s nerve wracking that they are going to cause a shitstorm about it) because of these notifications that read as very bad and can easily sour the relationship between myself and the patron. This rings especially true if they aren’t an active patron that will read posts/PMs related to it if i tried to contact them about the issue before hand to let them know that the email patreon sends when i press that button are inaccurate in this case and is just the only way i can deal with declines. I didn’t know this sort of thing got sent for a long time (I’ve never been blocked) and now it makes sense why some never contacted me back when prompted or why some people who were interacting a little just stopped after. This hurts our fan bases! I don’t understand why this isn’t one of the simplest things on the road map and hasn’t been done more than a year ago since we’ve been complaining about this for literal years.
It’s a button. That does the same thing as a block but without the nasty emails/reporting feature (since it asks why you are blocking them.)
Heck even giving us the option of writing our own message to the person in a notification email (or no notification at all if we want) would be fairly simple. A lot of that code is already made and used for PMs.
I just don’t understand why this, one of the most simple feature requests of all time, isn’t even on the roadmap right now. And this isn’t coming from the standpoint of someone who knows nothing about coding a site either. It’s hard to not get super frustrated about this when i can’t see any reason and we’ve been given none, as to why this isn’t a thing yet. Are there some unforeseen issues? Is there something specific you guys want to do with this that’s been taking up time? Some insight would be great. 
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Agreed. So much agreed. I just had an email from a patron who needed to leave for unique technology reasons but is in a declined state. I advised I’d ‘block’ her on my side to stop any reminders or having her card run again and let her know that she’d get an email from Patreon advising of the block but that I’d immediately unblock her so she can return when she can. Her email reads, in part," Hello Casey, Just to let you know, I will return in a heartbeat as soon as I am able to do so; yes, Patreon’s email was quite harsh sounding. Boy, they make it seem as if one is no less than criminal!" I find this is in keeping with the feedback I get that the patron-facing piece of Patreon is non-supportive, non-responsive to issues and now is insulting. Just send no email at all if that’s the be done - although, why on earth that would be the case.
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Wow, I had no idea what the emails looked like that the patrons receive, and we often end up blocking our long-declined patrons. What a way to ensure they will never want to sign back up! This is ridiculous. 
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One more update on this - I blocked and unblocked the $50 patron I mentioned previously. She understood because I explained beforehand, but now she wants to pledge again to a different tier and can’t because the system is still treating her as blocked. She’s not listed in my “blocked users” because I unblocked her, so there’s nothing I can do.
I contacted support; they said that in this case it’s better if she contacts them. I passed the word along, but this is a patron who checks her email once a week at best, so the process is long and drawn out, and I have to rely on her not getting frustrated and giving up. We’re already halfway through the next month and she still isn’t back as a patron. Meanwhile I have a special offer running that she might miss out on.
So needless to say, now I’m pretty scared to use the block/unblock method on anyone else.
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Blocking and unblocking isn’t dropping the ‘‘active patron’’ thing :
I want to remove them without completely blocking them, Patreon gave them $10 access when they just paid $5
I hope Patreon is working on fixing its bug of declined people getting access on charge upfront pages, because now mixed with being unable to drop a patron is a very horrible mix!
I originated this discussion over a year ago. Last September, @mindy stated that “it’s one of the most highly requested features to come from the forum”. I just wonder what factors keep pushing “one of the most highly requested features” down the development list. Is it technically difficult? Does it go against some operating principle? It would be nice to know.
Basically: everyone wants a third option: not block, not continue - what about ‘suspended’, dependent on payment clearing, then thereafter removed (with the ability to resubscribe if they want to)?
Wow, good to know! We block and then unblock patrons from time to time when they have been declined for several months, but I always assumed they’d be able to re-sign up if they wanted to. This is pretty bad news.
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We have been requesting it for, no exaggeration, 3 years. I have lost track of how many times I’ve posted about it. I even brought it up at PatreCon. The silence is expletive unbelievable, to be frank.
and it used to exist, that only makes it more frustrating.
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I’m very confused about ‘patrons’ that have been declined for a long time. One example I have right now is someone that has a $2 pledge. $8 lifetime support, and was last charged 2018-05-25. But under their avatar it still says “Your patron for 20 months” and what tier they are a part of. And then on their page it says they are a patron of my campaign.
I went around and soft blocked a few of these but that seems unreasonably harsh. Why can’t there be a ‘they are not scamming but I don’t want them on my page because they are obviously not coming back’ option? Or maybe declines can be moved to ‘no reward’ so my tier numbers are accurate and I don’t accidently give out extra tier rewards.
Finally, I understand they cannot see the patreon page itself but do these declined patrons still receive/keep any discord access?
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Hey @Beetlecat, thanks for making this post and sharing your experience with declined patrons.
Firstly, let me assure you that patrons in a declined state do not have access to Discord as a benefits. Once a patron declines, they lose access to patron only posts and benefits associated with their tier.
We don’t cancel patrons’ pledges automatically, so their membership remains “active” until they cancel it. That said, i can see how an option to delete patrons’ memberships on your end would be useful, as blocking patrons to remove their pledge isn’t something we recommend.
To ensure that patrons in a declined state don’t receive rewards, I always recommend using your Relationship Manager filters, and selecting the option to only include Paid patrons. This will remove any declined patrons from your list view.
Here’s our guide on using the Relationship Manager filters to manage patron communication and benefits: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004385971-Managing-your-patrons
While I can’t make guarantees, I’ve shared your feedback on this with our product team. We’re always building and iterating on the site to help creators with their memberships. Thanks again for your suggestion!
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This has been an ongoing issue that many of us have been struggling with. For quite a while we were blocking patrons to removed their long-declined pledges. Lately we’ve stopped doing that, but now it’s kind of an administrative headache as we try to message our newly-declined patrons, but our list of declined patrons just grows and grows. We have found it can be useful to send personal messages to patrons whose pledges decline, but it becomes challenging to sort out which ones we need to message or not (no point sending 6 or 10 messages to the same patron, and might even be counter-productive). A way to delete declined patrons after we’ve messaged them a couple of times would be a huge help!
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Honestly, this seems like something Patreon should be doing on their end. Something like “Your credit card has been declined three times. Please update your information by this date or your pledge will be removed.”
That way we don’t have to spend time chasing these people down. I have one who’s been declined for a year now.
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Thanks for the reply that this is functioning as intended. My question is Why DON’T you cancel declined Patreons pledges automatically tho? If they want to resub they can just resub when they want to.
I just can’t see the reason to leave these ghost people around (that afaik don’t show up under my notifications as cancelled) so I don’t know to cancel their off-site benefits unless I go and tally up every patron every month…
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