Be careful when buying CORE membership

Muh (your) pointsu! 

I've been accumulating points from your donations in order to use them as prizes in future contests. To my horror I noticed that my dA points balance has shrunk on its own!

I bought 3 months CORE membership with extra 3 months in it, so 6 months in total about one and a half year ago. Unfortunately I didn't realize it also enabled automatic rebilling! I rarely check my membership status or point balance, so I had no idea the points I wanted to save for future use went on renewing my membership. Technically I need the membership only for the polls.

I'm sorry that my carelessness led to your points being wasted on renewing my membership... if you buy CORE membership sometime without plans to renew it and you have some points in your balance, make sure to disable automatic rebilling from your account settings. It seems dA will enable it every time you buy CORE. Gifts probably won't trigger that.

As you can see from my donation pool, I have accumulated over 12, 000 dA points in total thanks to your patronage. It's such a shame that around 4 800 da points were unintentionally wasted on renewing my CORE membership (with some more being used intentionally on it). As I said, I was planning to use those points as rewards for a future contest(s). I've postponed next contest because at the time there were plans to make a contest at Nobody and I didn't want to have another contest running at the same time.

Thanks to your donations, I was able to hold a contest with point rewards (I was also able to secure a promised prize from my personal point pool in a different contest due to some disagreements between the judges). And of course, I've been able to hold polls on some interesting topics. I also thank those who have given membership as gifts for that has allowed me to accumulate those points for future.

I do appreciate your donations and while this journal may give a vibe of point begging, there is no need to donate points or CORE because of this journal. I just wanted to warn you about this default behavior of dA (although you are probably not as careless as I'm). I'll consider either buying more points or use real money prizes instead when the time is ripe. I suppose real money prizes are allowed are they? At least it's fine to use points as prizes in contests of skill according to this FAQ894. I gotta check how money prizes are treated, because I assume you would prefer them over points. If you are up for interesting and challenging contests, that is.

Next one will be about drawing two pages manga contest or a new pose practice challenge. We shall see.

Nsio of the Hermit Mystics