Clarification: newly registered member, membergroup, paid subscriptions

[OCJ]

I've read quite a few posts and the docs but would like to be sure about a few points before I dive in. With real payments being involved I'm not sure how much testing I will be able to do before it goes live soon.

This is for a club with membership payments due soon and lots of people already imported from another system.
Newly registered people will have a limited set of permissions similar to guests .... as long as they can log in, get information about paid subscriptions and access their profile to make one, probably 'waiting membership'.
For current members I will probably put in a new group with restricted permissions  - '2010 member'.

Main Questions:
1. From what I have read, when someone registers themselves, the default 'regular members' group is what they go in. There is no way to set another group in admin, except by using a mod (Default Membergroup).
Or by registering people manually in admin - no use in this case.

So I have a choice of relying on the mod to put new members in a restricted permissions group, or controlling the permissions of the default group 'regular members',  so they can only log in and access paid subscriptions?

2. I saw that paid subscriptions has a  'sandbox' option. If I set up an SMF subscription in my PayPal account, will the sandbox function allow me to make test registrations and subscription payments through PayPal without actually making a real transaction? That will use the return URL to open accounts?
I have refunded payments before when people make mistakes but would rather not go through several (or more) real transactions to test it out.

Andy

[Ashley S]

1. You have to create a new 'Member Group' and make it default for users that register.
2. 'Sandbox' will not let you create 'free' transactions.

[OCJ]

1. You have to create a new 'Member Group' and make it default for users that register.

I've been unable to find this setting to make another group default for registration... all I can see under the admin registration menu is manually registering 1 new member - only option is 'register', there is no 'save' option for default group.

Can't see anything in general permissions, membergroup permissions or under member permissions either?
Andy

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

You should probably go around the other way. Make regular members the restricted default group, no messsing about since everyone will be in this group by default - and then make another new membergroup that gives the members the access and permissions they should have when they have paid their dues.

1. You have to create a new 'Member Group' and make it default for users that register.

This is actually not possible.

[OCJ]

I used the mod to set the default new member group rather than mess about with smf's default group settings in case I had problems later. The new members are severely restricted and I had a lot of trouble setting the permissions so it would work the way intended.
So far so good ...except paid subscriptions if failing 100% of the time (2005).

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Strange, are you using Paypal and have you set up the Paypal IPN (on Paypals side)?

[OCJ]

Paypal and the subscriptions are set up and working.
Paypal return URL is working but its always set as 2005 finished. Ive not had one yet that was set correctly, which means its pretty much all manual.
Others have trouble with this but the developers ... "cant reproduce it". I dont think they are testing SMF on large host providers like Bluehost, Justhost etc. There is a topic about this.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Yeah, I noticed were handling this on several topics - would be best if we continued with the other one only, and mark this solved if there is nothing else that needs attention in this topic anymore?