Tracking clicks of guest users, with some decent kind of uniqueness - javascript

Please be advised, this is not a code-problem question.
I have a resource in my app that is available only for authenticated users. In case a guest user tries to access the resource by clicking on it - registration modal shows up.
Now, I'm building logic using jQuery and PHP in order to store those clicks of guests. However, I also would like to implement something, that will let me retrieve rough information on unique users among the ones who clicked.
The idea I have is this:
When a specific page is loaded, set a JS cookie of "unique" value,
like this: [random string of fixed size][timestamp]. The cookie
would expire in a year from now. If the cookie already exists, don't
do anything.
When the guest clicks on the resource, make an Ajax
call to store the click AND the cookie value.
Later, to get "unique" clicks, make a SELECT that will GROUP BY
the cookie value.
Unless the cookies are cleared or the custom cookie expiration date is exceeded, this should give me a way to determine unique clicks (users) among guests.
I'm interested, if anyone can provide me with a better way to achieve what I need.

I wouldn't reinvent the wheel and use Google Analytics for this kind of task, since it's almost doing al the job and giving you nice graphics and statistics for free.

Related

How to set up free and paid versions of website?

I am currently redesigning a website and looking for a solution on how to add a paid version of the site.
For example, say I have a <select> drop-down box with 20 elements inside. However, I want 15 of these 20 elements to be disabled unless the user has a paid account. At this time, that is the extent of what I need to differentiate between free/paid versions.
I'm planning on adding the ability to register an account and log in, as well as some type of payment processor (recommendations are appreciated for this! - currently looking at using Django/Python). I just don't know how to best go about managing two different levels of the website, and allowing those additional options to paid members.
I'm working with calculators that are pure Javascript. Using Bootstrap for the page design. As far as anything else goes, I'm open.
To do that, you'd have to add a field with a default value of NULL to your database, let's call it "subscription", into your users table. Then, everytime a user login to your website, fetch the subcription value and write it into a session variable. The last thing you have to do to ensure free members aren't allowed to perform any actions the subscribed members can is checking the content of the session variable while :
building your html, or you could check it on the client side with javascript right after the premium element has loaded (this is for user experience only since a client can remove any html attribute whnever they want)
and
while recieving the data of the premium element on the server side, accept it if the user is premium, reject it if they're free (again, just checking the session variable should do the job).
So as you can see, it's much more about preventing free users to gain access at the paid members options than allowing paid members to browse a completly new version of the website designed specifically for them.
I will try to give you a blunt idea maybe this might help you.
So lets say a user has paid for your service you can flag a token in yours app's backend if a particular user is paid or not. So whenever the user logs in your app next time you can get the status of the logged user.
Once you get the status of the logged user you can enable or disable ui elements.
I hope this made some sense.

How to validate a button click on client side

Let's say, i have a website and it has one button: click me, and also a counter which counts how many times people clicked on the button.
The thing is, how to validate if the clicker is a real person, that he clicked only once e.t.c. ?
Ip's can be changed. Also, it's not a good choise to make a whole account system for a single button.
1.- You can save the count in the cache to make it accessible on the backend side.
2.- In the Frontend you cannot access to the IP, so you won't be able to check at that level.
3.- Maybe what you're looking for is a button with a Post in a login website, then everytime the button is clicked you can send the post with the user information and saved.
4.- To validate if'ยก it is a human you can use Google Captcha.
Hope this helps you!
You can use Google Invisible ReCAPTCHA. It's not 100% reliable when it comes to detect bots (it has been proven mutliple times by the past) but still very efficient.
However, to detect if a single person have clicked only once, there is no viable solution I think. You can maybe add a cookie and check if the cookie exists but it can be easily bypassed by simply deleting the said cookie.
To authenticate a unique device, you can store MAC, IP address, and User Agent. Of course, all those can both be spoofed to allow multiple clicks. That solution would also limit to one person per device, which may not be your intent. Storing User Agent with the MAC address is more difficult to get around than a cookie (that can be deleted).
You can eliminate the most common bots by their user agent, or you can use a CAPTCHA.
You authenticate persons by email account or OpenID, but I assume you want to make clicking the button as easy as possible.

Passing product id between pages

I have a problem, I am writing a system for an company and I want it to be as secure & robust as possible, but now I'm stuck.
I have a product list, where a logged-in employee can edit, delete or emit (print) specifications about a product.
Let's assume I'm a logged-in employee on that system. When I click a product from the product list and then click on emit (print), javascript will send data over POST to the next page (Yes, it must be JS, because of the design of the page).
So the next page is displayed with correct info about that product (because POST passed the product id to the next page, which then realized an SQL query and fetched all info).
Now, on that page, I can verify if all info is correct and then click again on emit (print) to finally print the specifications. But here I came across a caveat: How will the next page know the product ID? I can't use POST, because there's nothing to post..
Cookies are designed for such stuff, but I think that when I'm logged in two tabs on the same browser and then click print on both tabs at once, the same Cookie will get called twice and overwritten twice (conflict), and, consequently, product id's could get swapped.
$_SESSION I believe I can't use too, because if two users are logged on the same Machine, data could get swapped too, just like in cookies.
Now, what is the 'best' practice to pass data between pages that "supports" multiple concurrent users on the same machine, and even in the same browser?
This somewhat similar question solved my problem:
Any way to identify browser tab in JavaScript?
This way I can create an unique "emitID" for that tab and then use that to take track of the current product id.
Also thanks to #SteevePitis for pointing me in the right direction.

Content Rating Widget using XSLT

I have created some solution for content rating in our websites using XSLT. User is allowed to rate whether he likes the article or not. by clicking yes or no. I want to somehow avoid the user giving multiple feedbacks for the same article. I thought of handling it in Database by using sessionid and ip address but that would create unnecessary space in DB. I want to filter the request before its been sent to DB itself.
I don't think you can avoid DB if you are aiming a perfect solution. You could use for example cookies or any kind of session variables to store the necessarry information, but that's not enough: user can delete cookies or log into your application from multiple computers. If you want to prepare for every situation like this you need the information retain over sessions: DB is the solution.

Popup based on user account status

I want to create a popup which is easy, but here's thing, I want to hide it if you become a paid member, and I want it to appear again if you don't subscribe the next month, I am using the paypal button html code and not the ipn, the paypal button is in the account section of the site, well if you want I can put it in the pop-up and i can use the ipn if i have to, instead of the html code just want someone to guide me on how it's done
You're going to need some sort of user authentication to see if someone has purchased your product or not. This should be handled with a server-side language (PHP, Ruby, etc.) and you can change the layout of your page based on whether the user has authenticated or not.
If you don't have any server-side code, you could use cookies that are saved when you receive a successful callback from PayPal, but that isn't going to be very reliable because they won't be found if the user changes browsers or computers.
If you dont want to use a back-end then use cookies. If they have correct values stored in the cookie, use javascript to hide or change the elemts on the page

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