It turns out there is a flaw in the way I had configured one aspect of automated membership management.

One of the early problems identified (back as early as 2006 actually) was that people would register a profile, but fail to confirm their email address. To "keep things tidy" I programmed a cron job to convert any profile that had not confirmed their email address within 14 days to a suspended profile. The assumption was these were bot registrations or would-be spammer registrations that had gone wrong.

It turns out this cron job has produced an unexpected consequence.

When a member changes their email address, their profile changes to the "awaiting email confirmation" group.
If you confirm, all well and good. Things go back to normal.
However, if you don't confirm the new email address within two weeks, the profile gets suspended.
As a result, even regular members we know well and love have ended up having their profile suspended by this pattern.
Which was not the intention.
And which means the member has to contact me to intervene and reinstate the profile.

I have just killed the cron job - who cares if there are a pile of awaiting confirmation profiles. We've got a lot better at filtering the bot registrations and spammers in other ways anyway.

All that remains is for me to apologise to any of our regular members who may have been affected.
My sincere apologies for any inconvenience or distress caused.