Chengdu Worldcon Now Accepting Credit Cards
Posted on January 23, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 6 Comments
For those folks outside China who wanted to get a membership at this year’s Worldcon in Chengdu, but were stymied because the Worldcon site wasn’t accepting payments from outside China, there’s good news: The site now accepts credit card payments. I tried it myself and the site acknowledged my payment and membership (although, please note, after a half hour, it has yet to email me a receipt).
Please note that this year’s membership set-up is slightly more complicated than usual. If you want to vote for the Hugos this year (and nominate, if you did not have a membership for last year’s Worldcon in Chicago), and vote for future Worldcon site selections, you will specifically have to purchase a WSFS membership. Then, if you want to attend, either online or in person, you will have to purchase that attending membership separately. The WSFS membership is $50; the online attending membership (which I suspect is the one most people not living in China but still wishing to attend will end up getting) is $10. I believe you can get an attending membership without a WSFS membership (i.e., without Hugo voting rights), but I didn’t get the memberships in that sequence, so I can’t be sure.
Note also that if you want to be able to nominate for this year’s Hugos, and did not have a membership to last year’s Worldcon in Chicago, you will need to purchase your WSFS membership by January 31, which is (checks watch) soon.
Here’s the link to the English language site for the Chengdu Worldcon, if you want to get a membership.
(Also, if you have any further questions about memberships, the Chengdu Worldcon or anything else relating to those two subjects, please ask the Worldcon, not me. All that I know I have just shared, and I am not a customer support representative for the Worldcon. Thanks.)
…Worldcon Customer Support not your new exciting day job?… Ah. Okay.
Speaking as someone who was in the Business Meeting when this change was discussed and voted on, the intent was that you could purchase an Attending Supplement separately, but you couldn’t do anything with it other than transfer it to someone else (who might have purchased a WSFS membership separately) or purchase your own WSFS membership to go with it, which would then give you the right to attend the con (in person or virtually, depending on the type of Attending Supplement purchased). Attending Supplements are intended to be transferable, WSFS memberships (once associated with a unique real person) are not (with, I think, an exception for the estates of people who die after purchase).
The main motivation for the change was to relieve conventions of trying to keep track of who was eligible to vote for what when a membership was transferred after some, but not all, of the associated voting rights had been used by the original purchaser (especially when some of the votes were still in progress). Now when you purchase a WSFS membership, you will get all of the associated voting rights that have not yet expired, and those rights stay with you even if you later decide to pass your Attending Supplement on to someone else. (The principal exception to transferability of WSFS memberships is when the original purchaser was never eligible to exercise the voting rights in the first place, such as an organization purchasing gift memberships for persons to be named later – those memberships can be transferred, since there is no possible conflict over the voting rights.)
That was the intent of the change. I don’t know how much of this Chengdu has actually implemented, but any questions about that should be directed to them.
Yeah, I’m not giving China my credit card info. I have 3 cards: My main card with plenty of credit, my Internet card with $500, and my emergency backup card with plenty. I got my $500 internet card (the bank doesn’t call it that of course) for the express purpose of ebay, amazon, PSN, etc. If it gets hacked I’m out $500 tops, and less if I bother to contest the charges.
No way am I giving even that that disposable card to China.
Aaaand the site’s down. What’s the Scalzi-post equivalent of slashdotting?
They’ve been scalzid? Scalzified? Scalzidotted?
@Arnon
Scalded
Yeah, they have a scaling problem (too).
Allowing little more than a week to sign up was Not Smart and just encourages server overloads. I would hope that if there are any adults on that concom they’ll extend the deadline.