Membership levels will not work properly at all.

I've had this membership issue with every version of Dolphin, starting with 7.01 and currently also on my 7.06 upgraded Dolphin. There are currently 3 membership levels ... All of them are free.

The moderator is for site admins with almost unlimited access. Pretty sure those are fine too. Nobody can be a moderator unless that membership is actually assigned to them by myself, the admin account holder.

The promotional membership appears to work properly as well, but not without problems because when I try to change a promotional membership to a standard membership while logged in as admin, that step won't work for whatever reason. The SET TYPE button is there but when I click on it I can't enable the checkbox or select the unlimited duration field. Assigning memberships via admin used to work, don't know exactly when that stopped.

Even worse, the standard memberships that do exist ... DO NOT WORK according to the privileges that have been assigned to them. First and foremost the purpose of the standard membership is supposed to be of permanent duration. That appears to (still) work. But when a member with a standard account tries to add videos or sounds or photos to one of their existing albums, up comes ... ACCESS DENIED:
I have checked the permissions, settings, and every thing else that I could think of repeatedly during the past several months, after every upgrade, and still this problem persists.

Is it perhaps NOT POSSIBLE to have a FREE permanent account for people who join?
This is driving me nuts, what is causing those access denied messages?
Again, the promotional accounts do not have this problem ... Any ideas or fixes ... anyone else ???

Wow, that's just grand, 24 hours later and not a single helpful response.
Way to go Boonex, that's the way to attract more business ...

At this point I've been able to figure out that only the promotional accounts work correctly. Maybe it's because none of the other account types are paid for, I don't know. Bottom line is that I've had "error free upgrades" from 7.01 to 7.02 to 7.03 to 7.04 to 7.05 and finally 7.06 and all the while only the promotional accounts are working 100% correctly. And yes, of course I checked all of the approved/disapproved features in each of the available account types.

The existing account types can't be deleted either, to be recreated. The checkbox for each of them is greyed out. I can't place a checkmark in them, nor can I uncheck a box. The checkboxes are just there as if they had no purpose at all.

hey there, so your statement is that only the promotional membership level is functional?

when you state that a membership level is 100% working, exactly what are you referring to.

you can have a free site, but the membership levels creations are designed as a paid entity. i have never seen anybody really create multi-tiered memberships for something which would implement free access at all levels. the underlying reasoning of membership levels at all, would be to allow access to certain areas and functions of the site.

i believe with creating addtional membership levels and desiring them to be free, it would require you to update the membershp levels manually.

Thanks for the response, and yes, the promotional memberships are working perfectly fine.

Our project is a .org in essence www.steinfein.org and we offer everything for free to anyone who's interested. It may seem a bit idiotic but it's supposed to be like a helpful place for computer newbies, seniors, mildly handicapped people, and of course everyone else too ... has a lot to do with the fact that my grandparents raised me over the course of several years and the additional fact that the internet with all of its bullshit advertising is just not very senior friendly at all. Far too many distractions and too many places to go if you want to enjoy everything that internet communities have to offer. My Mom & Dad have had a computer with internet for roughly 10 years now and they're still too intimidated by a lot of sites & pages with banners, flash ads, popup ads, floating ads, message ads that appear to look like real messages, text link ads, etc.

Anyway, so the purpose of a promotional account, from our point of view, was to help people determine if our site is really where they wanted to be ... by enabling most of the things that a standard permanent member would have access to. After "x" amount of days the promotional membership would be renewed to a standard free membership, this time with a few extra perks, primarily where bandwidth and permitted file types are concerned. Since everything is free and since we pay for everything, server load and responsible memberships were of concern to me.

The promotional membership would also allow me to review, on my own time, how responsibly a member is utilizing their membership, before granting them almost unlimited access with a standard account.

For some reason, and I have no idea why, current promotional membership levels are showing up with unlimited days which is a bit odd, considering that they're set to 120 days. It's the standard membership that was supposed to be unlimited. Since the ACCESS DENIED problem is indeed a huge monumental problem which prevents members from taking the site seriously, I suppose that I can just live with the promotional memberships only. At least those work and then I don't need to deal with fixing this issue anymore.
Would have been nice to get that corrected though, ah well.