On Friday, December 21, 2018 at 4:28:22 PM UTC-5, Steve Leonard wrote:
On Friday, December 21, 2018 at 2:55:51 PM UTC-6, wrote:
On Friday, December 21, 2018 at 2:08:05 PM UTC-5, Tango Eight wrote:
https://www.ssa.org/Join

It's not really all that hard.

T8

"Please use this form for New Memberships only. If you wish to renew a membership please log into the SSA website first."
- and no further instructions.

From the home page, if you manage to find "join" in the drop-down menus, you get this: https://www.ssa.org/HowToJoin - where it says:
"Renew your membership online by clicking here [leads to the page you mentioned]. You must sign up as a new member, but in the instructions box, please advise you are renewing your membership. You can also call the SSA office to renew."

I rest my case.

As I said before, "No system will be perfect in the eyes of all operators".

I am logged in. I hover on "The SSA" and select the "Join" drop down. I get a page that allows me to do one of two things:

Renew Full Membership
or
Renew Full Membership and sign up for automatic renewal

As with any website I have seen, if you are a member AND logged in, the options are tailored to what members want. Try it when logged in. It is set up this way so new members Join and existing members Renew.

If you have not created a login or have troubles, there is a button at the top right that can help you. It is called "Login Help".

In regard to the "no further instructions" comment. Would it be helpful to standardize the language so we don't have some places saying "Log In" and some saying "Sign In"? People like myself expect to see common verbiage and I will see what can be done about this. But the "Sign In" or "Log In" is the blue box top right on the page.

Steve Leonard
Region 10 Director, SSA

By "no further instructions" I meant that it _only_ says "If you wish to renew a membership please log into the SSA website first." That does not explain what to do next. It could have said right the "After you login this page will look different and will include a renewal option." I tried that now, and indeed it leads to a renewal checkout. That is different from (and an improvement on) what it looked like when I renewed last year. But that contradicts what it still says in the first "join" page: [to renew] "You must sign up as a new member, but in the instructions box, please advise you are renewing your membership" - which is how it used to be done.