A guest account has no privileges on your website and does not count toward your Visual Pursuits subscription. Only competing members count against your subscription.
When a membership expires, a person is no longer a member in your organization. Instead, we change their status to "guest". This allows you to search for the member from your Manage Members page if you check the option to display "inactive members".
Administrators have the ability to email to the "guests" group. This is useful if you have an event to announce to past members or if you are trying to recruit old members back into the club.
An account is needed if you want to sign up for any public event from your website. An account is needed to identify the person. This is a "guest" account if they are not a member of your organization.
Judges also have a guest account with the added Judge role. This allows them to login to your website to perform website judging. They would only have permissions to perform judging and are not members.
If you assign roles to a guest account, they would immediately become a full member.
Administrators are not notified when a guest account is created because it has no impact on your organization and grants no privileges. If someone signs up for a public event, the event manager is notified.