What does the member status field do?

The system does look to another field--the expiration date field--to determine a member's eligibility for whatever member privileges you allow. So the obvious question then is, "why is the member status field even there?"

There are two reasons for the member status field to be there. Both of these reasons come into play in very rare situations:

1. Banning. Every so often a club wants to investigate the eligibility for membership of a user _after_ that user has already purchased membership. While this process takes place, the admin will change the Member Status field to 0 to temporarily disallow benefits. This way, there is no need to lose the expiration date and other membership transaction-related data while the admin investigates.

2. Pending Memberships. Some organizations have a setting that allows them to:
Step 1 - sell a membership to an individual in Pending mode.
Step 2 - have an admin review the person's eligibility.
Step 3 - then change the status to 1 once the person is approved. Of course, this is NOT the default behavior.


Here's the way the logic works when the system is looking at a user to determine if they are indeed a current member or not:

1. The system first checks to see if the member status field is a "1" or a "0."

2. If the value of the member status field is 0, then it doesn't matter what the expiration date is--that user will not have membership privileges.

3. If the value of the member status field is 1, then the system will check the expiration date field to see if the expiration date is sometime after "today." As long as the expiration date is still sometime after today, this user will be treated as a member by the system and have access to any content or functionality on the system that requires them to be a member.