Have you rolled this back yet for Active members?

If so, I think this could be solved for us with a small change.

In the Renewal Policy, there's now an option "Generate and email invoice and change status to Pending - Renewal." So members are automatically put in Pending - Renewal status when the invoice is emailed.

The fix is to provide a separate checkbox for "Change status to Pending - Renewal."

Then we and Rachel could dispense with Pending - Renewal status completely, and just go from Active to Lapsed at the end of our grace period.

And the other organizations could use Pending - Renewal to block non-paid members from registering for events.

Rachel,
You are absolutely right! It looks like recent changes introduced a logical bug: members in Active status can't register on member only events if they have Renewal date in the past. It's definitely wrong behavior. Active members should have all membership benefits, regardless of their Renewal Date.
We're going to fix it on our nearest release.
Thank you for your feedback! We're very sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Walt,
Thank you for your feedback! We've also received similar comments regarding Pending-New, Pending-Renewal and Pending-Level statuses through our support channel. We do not yet see any quick solution — because there are situations, when "people apply for membership, not pay the invoice, register for the event as a member and pay for the event as a member".
But, since this logic not suitable for all associations, we are considering another solution - option to enable/disable this logic or something else.

I VERY MUCH disagree. This is what the LAPSED status is for. We as other associations have grace periods as well as a non-rolling membership set-up. If we labelled a member Active we knew they could register for member-only events and other things. It should NOT be the due date of dues that dictate when functions of an Active status suddenly shut off. It should be OUR choice. It gives us much more work when members suddenly cannot sign up for events. There is a reason WA has both statuses for memberships, it keeps things in order for the association's database and also controls the members' functions. You want to make all that moot and just go with when they need to pay up? That takes away a lot of control for the association--AND gives more work. Please leave as before!! Put your members in Lapsed status if you're concerned of people going to things before joining/renewing.

More details for fix #1 below:

I suggest a site-wide option to select whether to treat Pending - New members as Active or Lapsed.

So in other words, in the table at https://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/How+membership+status+affects+available+functionality , some of the entries in the column for Pending - New would be taken from either the Active or Lapsed column, depending on this setting. And some would remain as is.

There is also an issue with Pending - Renewal. We have a grace period past the renewal date before we actually change their status to Lapsed. So we would want the entry for member-only events in the Pending - Renewal column to also follow this proposed setting.

This might also fix a problem where Pending - New members are omitted from the Directory Gadget.

We need Pending - New members to be able to register for events while awaiting the formality of Board approval. With this feature, they no longer can.

This could be fixed in one of two ways:

1) Provide an option whether to allow pending members to register for an event. This would be easiest to do site-wide or in the Membership Level.

2) Implement my suggestion in https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8825782-free-trial-period-for-membership for a "Pending - Trial" membership status.

As usual, I vote for #1 as the fastest, simplest way. :)

Allow only active members (not lapsed or pending) to register for an event.

Agreed. I have people who have 'Membership Renewal Pending" status as they have not paid their Membership invoice but are still registering for events for free; at least two people have figured out this loophole. I am manually cancelling their free event registrations and sending both Annual and Per-Event registration invoices and giving them the option on which one they wish to pay. In the meantime, even another column in the Event Attendance report listing "Annual Payment Amount Due" as a visual cue would be a useful to catch people at the door.

I concur with Audrey, Mike Gunn, and Teri in that in our organization we have unpaid "pending" members who then register for a member-only event, taking up a spot from others who have paid their memberships. To require admin approval on all registrations (even those who pay their membership immediately) punishes them and delays them from registering and getting a spot in limited events. Why can't each event have a checkbox "prevent pending members from registering"?? This seems like a basic functionality of any membership software/system - to electronically control unpaid access so we don't have to manually control it???

I heartily agree that members who have not yet paid renewals should be excluded from registering for members-only events. We also have this problem every year: our annual renewals are due August 1. We hold a big annual member event in mid-September and require that members pay renewal before attending. It's a pain to have to track manually.

We have the same problem. It seems to me that it would be a quite simple fix.

If membership, new or renewal, is pending. They can't access whatever membership benefits there are.

Right now, all you can do is set it so that all new memberships must be approved by an admin. That means during heavy event registration times someone has to be checking for new pending members all the time.

I assumed that by activating the setting, "Payment has to be received in full before membership is activated" that people who hadn't paid yet wouldn't qualify as members in members-only event registration types. However, they are! What does this setting do then? What does it mean for a member to be activated? I want it to mean that they don't get to be a member yet and have the benefits of membership - including members-only event registration!

We had several people apply for membership, not pay the invoice, register for the event as a member and pay for the event as a member. They came to the event and never paid their dues. I now have it set that admin has to approve membership and they have to pay before membership is activated - therefore they can't register without paying dues first, but it's a pain to keep up with the approvals so I wish the program would work on this.

Every year I have this same problem. People initiate renewal, register for a member only event and then turn up at the event without completing payment. So I agree completely with this suggestion.

Cannot really say, we need to perform proper analysis to decide on what should be done here.

Yes. I do not want people who haven't paid for membership having access to member benefits! I have to go through event registrations and individually email them their membership invoices, check whether they pay and cancel their event registrations if not, etc.

Could the event registration have a pending status tied to the membership status?

System suggest to process membership in first and generates invoice for that, then he can continue with event registration, generate another invoice and then pay for both invoices with a single payment transaction.

This is what I call not clear for end user and we need to simplify it somehow in future.

My site does not appear to be functioning this way - pending members who are registering for an event seem to have to pay first for the membership - I want it bundled in one invoice. Is there a setting for this?

I've received similar request from our support and found same related thread in our other forum - http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308929-general-discussion-and-questions/suggestions/8825068-new-membership-pending

Quoting: "For reasons no one can explain, a member who initiates renewal but does not complete the payment (which puts them in Pending-Renew state) can register for member-only event. This creates problems for us, since they receive the event registration confirmation e-mail and show up at the event."

As I explained int this thread earlier, this kind of "by design" behaviour to support scenario, when a member applies for membership (or renews it), registers for event and pays in a single transaction.

No I see that it's not the best solution and we have to improve it. So I will be collecting comments here to prioritize it higher and add into our Product Roadmap http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Product+roadmap

Lapsed is not considered as a Member, so they will have same access as any other public visitor. Pending does have access, but this is mostly to support the following scenario: a visitor starts registering for an event, sees that a registration type is for members only, uses special suggested button to proceed to membership application, completes it and becomes Pending new member, then returns back to event registration, completes it as a member now and then pays for both invoices.

What is your need in the setup you suggested (per status)? Can you please provide some examples?