Help (bugs) with Canceled Patrons

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1

I struggled with this same old issue again today…

  1. I get no e-mail notification when a patron cancels. I see that the total patron count and dollar amount on my public page is different from the spreadsheet I have to maintain to track these things, and then I have to go looking in the notifications list to sync up. PLEASE send e-mail notifications for cancellations! We’ve been asking for this forever – why no action?

  2. There was no notification on the notifications screen for the canceled patron. The numbers were just silently off, with no reason shown. Why? Because the patron joined and then canceled in the same month. THE NOTIFICATION THAT THEY JOINED DISAPPEARED, which really, should be considered a bug. They joined! They did! There’s money in my account to prove it! Why did the notification ACTUALLY DISAPPEAR?!? Also, there’s NO NOTIFICATION THAT THEY CANCELED. If I didn’t have the e-mail, how would I figure out who this person was and what happened?

  3. Patron Relationship Manager SHOWS THE CANCELED PERSON AS AN ACTIVE PATRON – another bug. It still lists a pledge under the pledge amount, shows the number of days since they pledged in the “your patron for…” field. There’s nothing different for a canceled patron than for an active patron. The only way I can determine whether they ACTUALLY HAVE A PLEDGE TO ME is to go look at their personal Patreon page (e.g. /user/creators?u=…) and observe that I do not appear in the list.

PLEASE do something about these issues! I have to be able to track when patrons cancel and who is actually an active patron – because I give them access to systems outside of Patreon, and I need to know when to cut it off.

2

@ammulder, this is a bad experience. I’m sorry. You should not need external systems just to know who your patrons are. We know that having more access to data about patrons who leave is a top 10 request from creators. Rest assured I will be bringing this up with our product team as they prioritize what to build this year.

I was able to get more clarity for your third point - the patron still shows up as active if you have charge-up-front enabled. This is because that patron still has access for that month - they are still technically a patron, even though they canceled their pledge that would grant them access for the next month. I agree with you that it is confusing – the view Patron Relationship Manager gives is very boiled down so it can be hard to figure out what state a patron is in just off that data alone.

3

Regarding the charge-up-front thing…

I would like to see an indication in Relationship Manager that they have filed their cancellation as soon as they do it, even if they continue to have access for the month.

Alternately, I would be OK if they are still considered a full patron until the end of the month – but then I would expect them to still appear in the public patron/pledge total until the month was up, and I would expect a notification on the first of the next month that they had canceled. The current situation where they’re considered a patron on some screens but not on others is a mess.