[djohn]

One bright spot - we wondered if there was any chance that someone who will knowingly be taking a short-ish break (ie - take a month or two off while work or family activities are busy etc) could not have their org deleted when they return. Dan Hitt has indicated for a situation like that, to please contact customer service and they will attempt to work with you on a solution. I don't know how much leeway CS has in applying that, but for anyone who is in a temporary unsubscribed status, with intentions of re-subscribing at a later date - it might be worth a call to find out what they can do for you.

I am in this exact situation and contacted CS. They were willing to give me a couple months of Total Access for free but I had to pay right now for a year. They were really pushing me to re-up my Total Access subscription and not just an ORG subscription, telling me that there would be a price increase on Total Access if I waited. I even pointed out that I had previously paid for 2 years of ORG and after a year and 3 months I bought Total Access, so I should have 9 months of ORG remaining. They said it didn't work that way, and had I contacted them when I bought Total Access that they could have given me a discount or extension then, but nothing now.
Overall I am extremely disappointed with the CS at Beckett right now. To say that I was a loyal customer would be an extreme understatement. Since the early 1990s I have gone from regularly buying the magazines every month at my card shops to getting print subscriptions, and then I added a paid ORG subscription to my print subscriptions before finally changing to Total Access last year, not to mention buying the annuals every year. So now that I need to take a small break, they say pay us now (and you only have a couple days to do so) or you will lose everything when you are ready to come back. I agree with others that if they gave everyone a longer notice (even a month) that some of the outrage wouldn't be so bad. However it sounds like some people are just seeing the email today in which case they are only having 3 days to decide what to do. Doing this the week of a holiday weekend, is an extremely crappy thing even for Beckett.
I will be very interested to see the backlash that comes next week, when people that don't read the boards or check email from Beckett that often, log in and see all their ORGs deleted. I wonder if that will increase the traffic on the forum or if people will complain elsewhere. It would be nice if Beckett put a notice on their website, but they didn't even make a forum thread announcing this move. Heck if you were new to the site today it still says you can test drive ORG with up to 2,000 items for free.