I'd like to register all of our staff to have gravatars. They are an unreliable bunch, so if I ask them to sign up for one it would take about 6 months to get to 50% completion.
I could use selenium to drive the website to sign everyone up, then simultaneously reconfigure the spam filter to collect all the confirmation emails, then go back over all of those emails and confirm the accounts. But that feels like a very dirty hack.
This question mentions a similar need, but there isn't an answer.
Does anyone know if there is a better way to sign up for a lot of gravatar accounts in one go?
Gravatar protects itself from spamming their registrations system by using email confirms.
Besides, you're breaking their TOS by trying to automate signups.
Best thing to do is take the management approach - this is more of a management issue than programming - and tell your staff they are required to get a Gravatar, or 1) they don't get their daily Gummy Bears, or 2) they're fired.
Related
How do I require a password after x number of page views (or after x minutes)?
I have a website (running on WP) that I would like to allow free access to visitors for a while, but after a certain time require a password to continue seeing the site. This is to encourage sign up (also free).
I would rather not use a login system, rather a simple password to be entered. Ideally there would be a WP plugin with this feature, but I can't seem to find one.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
If you can't find a plugin that directly implements this behavior, I would question this feature. Of course you can just show a popup without a close button after X minutes but such pages rather encourage your users to leave the page than to sign up (what did you do the last time, did you sign up?). I would rather recommend to use a friendly and non blocking way to inform your users about the advantage of an account or subscription. If your content is good they will be happy to sign up. Furthermore, to make sure that they just do not reload the page after they were blocked you have to set cookies or track their IP. Both requires at least in the european union a data protection policy. In addition, you would need to implement a flow to bring users back from the registration to their desired content. I don't want to say that this is not possible or that there are no plugins out there that allow such a behavior but the efforts to implement this in a proper way are from my perspective unreasonable considering that there are more user friendly options.
A client granted me access to their Google Analytics. I need to share it with my contractor however I don't want them to access my Gmail. How can I provide them my login for Analytics and restrict them from accessing my Gmail.
(I'm trying to not bother the client and I don't have the right privileges to add another user to their Google Analytics account)
Thanks ahead of time!
If you give access to your Google Account to the contractor, of course it will also see Gmail.
Solutions:
Ask for access for the contractor;
Create a dashboard that reads data with Google Analytics API and share that with the contractor.
It's a Pickle 🥒
Straight from the get-go, I feel you. I've been in similar situations multiple times. It's a pickle of a situation. However, I think there is a good solution for you:
Ask your client for administrator access.
Now hold up! This may seem like something that will bother them, but it's something that will allow you to do the work you need to do. They want you to do a good job and have the tools to do it, and having admin access will allow for that. You wisely, do not want to share your login credentials with your contractor.
Reasoning 🤔
Having said that, it is my natural inclination to not ask a client to do work. It feels like an inconvenience to them, that they're paying me to do the work, and that they aren't paying me for them to do work. However, I've been training myself to think differently about that. I've been trying to reframe the relationship between us and clients like it's a partnership, that we're on the same team, and that we're both going to have to do work to see the project through to completion. I need to be able to ask the client to do work, like set up accounts, provide content, review edits etc. It's furthermore an exercise in trust. If they don't trust you enough to grant you admin access, it's your job to help them see that they need to trust you in order for you to do great work for them.
And they want you to do great work.
Strategy 🚀
I generally have my clients give me administrator access to all accounts that I need to manage. That way I can make any changes needed to the account and add users etc. I would have ran into a similar problem earlier today (the client granted me access to their Analytics account with my individual business email, instead of our joint email account that we use for those kind of activities). However, since I had asked them to give me administrator access, I was able to add our joint account as a user and remove my individual account.
Specifically in your situation, I would not recommend sharing your login information with a contractor. I think that is the only way of getting around getting admin access to their Analytics account.
I hope that helps you navigate that situation! Try to reframe the problem as an opportunity for some practice to ask your client to do something. It may seem be hard, but it will help so much in this situation, and for other situations where having the client do a bit of work will make your work and the project so much better.
You've totally got it! 😁
I work for an advertising agency working with several clients who we are building and managing wordpress websites for. One issue that arises every time with a new install, is the issue with emails not sending/receiving. We usually solve this by installing an SMTP plugin and set it up using the clients Office 365 email account or whatever provider they have.
The problem is that this is a little time consuming, as well as some of our clients either don´t want to give away their account information/they don't know their account information/they change passwords and forms stop working.
We need a stable email solution that we can use on a wide spectrum of client pages, and that we hopefully don´t need to set up every time we make a new webpage. Does anyone have any solutions/suggestions for this?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Before I get into the recommendation, WordPress should use your servers default sendmail configuration so it’s possible something is misconfigured here as it should work out of the box.
But if you want something a little more bulletproof I recommend SendGrid.
One of the problems with all your sites using the same mail server is if one is blacklisted for something the others go down. With SendGrid, which is free for 10k send a month I think, you can issue an api key for each site and if one has an issue it you can easily identify it in SendGrid.
I have setup dozens of API Keys and the plug-in. It’s fast and simple and takes about 5 minutes in total. They have great delivery, detailed reports and are cheap even if you need a lot of sends.
You can Signup for an account and use the SendGrid plugin from the Wordpress repository.
I want to set up a consulting service on my blog (WordPress). It would be really simple:
Someone asks me a question
I give them an answer via email (or possibly Skype conversation)
However, I'm having trouble figuring out how to receive payment for such service. I can ask for payment up front using platform like Sellfy/Selz, but that doesn't seems like a good solution.
How would you recommend doing this in the least complicated/most effective way? I'm looking to collect payments by PayPal.
EDIT: It would probably work if there was some kind of an escrow in which case both me (seller) and the buyer would be protected. However, it's more tricky to set it up since we're not dealing with actual products.
you can seperate the auth and capture process with paypal. But i think there are extra fees on this so research it carefully.
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/authcapture/
You can look at getting reference transactions with paypal. They provide you a small deposit before the service. Depending on time of service you can use reference transaction with paypal to charge them the total afterwords. Then if they come back, within 365 days you dont need a deposit if they want to use the same payment method.
I opted for the following solution, which is the simplest in terms of what I'm looking for:
Set up Contact form on the website (someone asks a question)
I write a reply and package it as a downloadable PDF
Set up the reply on a service such as Sellfy or Sellz (with possibly a short preview)
Send notification that reply is available for download
That way, the person only pays once the question is answered and I minimize my risks.
Tip: I'm going to set up a short "Terms of service" to which people agree when sending their question. It will be used as a disclaimer and protection against possible misuse of the system.
This question is not related to ASP.NET specifically, but more web applications in general.
I am building a web application wherein I am registering a user. As of now I am taking in very basic credentials like First Name, Last Name, etc of the user. In this website I am giving some information for free for any user who has just registered so that the user finds my website authentic and that it is not a fake website. After that, to get more information, the user has to pay.
The information my site provides will get obsolete after sometime. So, when a new user registers, he/she will get the new information that gets updated; but the old users have to pay to get the same new information.
My problem here is once the information gets obsolete the same person can re-register with a different set of credentials and get the new information. I want to avoid this from happening.
So my question here is this: what information should I request from the user, or extract from the user, to check that the same user is not re-registering? Or any other way to make this possible.
I am thinking of getting the IP address of the machine from which the person is registering and use it to check. But the user can use a different machine to re-register.
I am completely lost here and not getting the solution. I even checked on the Internet but could not find an answer.
Please let me know if you need any further information from my side.
You will not find a technical way to prevent users from registering multiple times. They can simply use another device, IP, another email account and different credentials.
What you can do is asking them to send you hard to fake "offline" information, like a credit card number or a photo of the ID. Some users may still be able to register multiple times this way, but probably not indefinitly. You will however lose many possible clients this way who are unwilling to provide such information for a test account, so this is likely not the solution you want.
My advice would be one of the following two:
Limit the information/service you give out to free users, so that even if they register again they will gain something when they pay.
Try to bind them to their account in a way where they would lose something if they threw it away. This may for example be providing user rewards for activity (real or virtual) or increasing their experience based on their history. Take SO for example: If you registered again, you would lose all your reputation. The users will think twice if this is worth the new content.
After reading all of the above, i think a good solution could be to let the user identify himself through facebook or linkedin. Few people will have a second account.
I think you cannot put any users like that because every thing can be duplicate
There are some ways for which the user must have payment mode or identity details like passport or it is windows application you can have finger scanner it will be definitely Unique..
You can do this (with limitations) with the use of cookies. Setting a cookie on the users device will allow you to determine who the visitor is and that they have already registered.
The limitations are that cookies can be deleted or blocked and are only valid for that specific user agent - the user could use a different device or a different browser on the same device. A lot of people don't really know about cookies though and how to delete them.
By tying this technique with a requirement to provide a valid email address you can make it a hassle for somebody to register more than once as they will have to create a new email account and then delete their cookies.
Whether this will stop enough people depends on your site and your requirements - if you're giving money away then this technique is not nearly good enough. If you just want to discourage the practice of multiple accounts it may be enough.
Your only way out is to have SOMETHING the existing user gets as a "gift?" or added value to maintain just one account. If you can identify items of value to your subscribers and offer to "give" it to them provided their account "attains" one or more status, then you'll get some control. Take stackoverflow.com for example, I don't need a second account.
Identifying by facebook or linkedin is a good option, but if you are giving such services. which are very beneficial for the users, so they dont mind on creating multiple accounts on even facebook or linked in.
So what i think is to set some reward type stuff with each user, and increase the services as they get increment in rewards.once they are good in rewards and are capable to use multiple services, this increases the probability that they will not create another account.