CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This may be an existing bug in the older version of the software you are using - or perhaps it is by design.  I do not know, and few people will remember which for a version 3 years old.   You won't find enthusiastic help on the forums for that older version but could scan  the JIRA issue tracker for a issue and attached patch.

I have sympathy for an organization in your position.  You invested to install CiviCRM, but sadly do not feel you have the money to invest in maintaining it and keeping it updated, not even to a more stable and reliable version of the 3.3 series like 3.3.6.  Nevertheless you still wish all the features to work as you expect.  It's a catch-22 for sure and a common predicament I see many organizations put themselves in.  I think CiviCRM could do a better job setting expectations on the downloads page, and I will suggest this at the next conference.

That's why I tell my clients if they cannot budget a small amount of money per year for at least one upgrade per year, do not use CiviCRM.  While upgrading CiviCRM is not as simple as upgrading Firefox or WordPress, it is not hard to do.  Unless you have huge amounts of customizations, upgrades can be very routine and require a volunteer with a little technical skill or hiring a consultant at a cost of perhaps less than $100.  I find it hard to believe many organizations cannot afford this, but since I hear this issue repeatedly, it must be the case that this is too much money, and that is unfortunate.

Anyway, I hope if you do not have the ability to upgrade CiviCRM you at least have the money or technical volunteer to backport security patches.  That version of CiviCRM you are using is highly vulnerable to hacks.

thanks for your input, I do appreciate it. I am now investigating getting my org onto a newer, better version of CiviCRM.

In the meantime, I went and disabled the (buggy) auto-renew option at the membership level. Unfortunately, the setting appears to be sticky - the contribution page used to process these memberships is still displaying a "Please renew my membership automatically" message with checkbox: https://bouldermountainbike.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=2. Is there a CiviCRM cache I need to clear, or something similar? If not, is there a way to disable this setting at the mySQL level? I really need to stop leading our members astray until we can accomplish the upgrade.