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yviTitle:
Allow paid account users to upgrade to premium paid accounts
Area:
accounts, shop
Summary:
Paid account users should be able to pay the point difference between their current account level and a 6/12 month premium paid account to get upgraded.
Description:
If you have a 'normal' paid account on Dreamwidth right now, but would like to have a premium paid account (maybe someone else gifted you the paid account time, maybe you suddenly realized you need those 500 extra notifications, whatever), it would be good if you could just pay the difference in Dreamwidth points and convert your account to a premium paid account.
I admit I have no idea what would happen now if I just purchased a premium paid account in the store right now and because I am not interested in having one at the moment, I am not going to try. However, it looks like someone who has a few months left of regular paid account time pays the same price as someone who has a free account. Since from looking at another bug in the bugtracker I just learned that there is currently no downgrading from a premium to a regular paid account, it obviously won't be the case that you would have a premium paid account for 6/12 months and then be downgraded to a regular paid account. So I think the system should calculate how many points the remaining regular paid time you have on your account is worth and subtract that from your order.
Examples of how I think it would work:
A regular paid user has two months left on their paid account. That's 60 Dreamwidth points. They go into the shop and select 6 months of premium paid account time, which is worth 250 points. The system should ask the user whether they want to upgrade their account level and then tell the user that they need 190 points to perform the upgrade.
A regular paid user has 10 months left on their paid account. 6 months paid time is 175 points, 12 months is 350, and from there on the system should probably make some sensible calculations and rounding and so on, so I'd gather 10 months is worth about 290 points. The user goes into the shop and selects 12 months of premium paid account time, which is worth 500 points. The system should ask the user whether they want to upgrade their account level and then tell the user that they need 210 points to upgrade their account.
The calculations with rounding are probably going to be a bit tricky to implement - rounding down to the nearest full month and then having fixed values for those would probably be easiest, but with the points system, there can also be smaller steps. There can also be situations where the users gets Dreamwidth points back - which isn't bad, in my opinion, as that doesn't mean Dreamwidth will have to pay back money, it just means the points can be used for something else. But I think it's worth it so that users can upgrade their account without having to wait or feeling like they are losing something.
(And I certainly know that I have been hesitant to gift paid account in the past because I didn't know whether the user would maybe want a premium account)
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
16 (44.4%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
6 (16.7%)
(I have no opinion)
14 (38.9%)
(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)