If you've missed out on promotion don't worry we will get to you, I'm running the old check every two hours as well for the time being to try and catch everyone.
I'll post more details on the new plugin and what it means for the way promotions work very soon.
UPDATE:
I've turned on a feature that will attempt to calculate a players first join date from the main player data file, this will work better for some than others and will always give a slight underestimate at best, however for new players waiting for Member rank this should help get you closer to the usual 1 week! The calculation is individual and will take place the next time the player joins the server (may take several minutes from login).