Captive Portal self registration

[robertfranz]

Our use case is free customer wifi in cafes.

Desired behavior would be that a newly registering user would input desired username and password, and provide an email address for contact purposes.

After submitting this info, they would then be sent an activation link.

They would then be granted 10 minutes of usage to check for the email, and click the link.

At this point, their account would be converted to an unrestricted plan.

It seems as if most of the pieces are there.

If I go forward with this app, I'm looking at multiple copies of the Premium edition, and at that price, my bosses will be gathering torches and pitchforks if the application only does part of what I need.

[alan]

FirstSpot supports self sign-up feature (under Authentication Server) like you mentioned. In addition, you can take advantage of our "Extra Information Fields" feature (under UI Customization) to capture the customers' email address.

Currently, we don't support email verification but we do support SMS Sign-up (i.e. verification through SMS).
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~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[robertfranz]

Do you foresee this feature being added at some point?

Seems like all the heavy lifting has been done.

SMS is ok - I really should have both, given the iphone use.

[alan]

Definitely yes. In fact, we evaluated the email verification feature in the past. Part of the difficulties is that there is no easy way for the customer to check email before gaining Internet access.

Your 10 minutes email checking free access seems to make sense and we will take a look at it internally.
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~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[robertfranz]

Any chance of getting having this done as custom coding?
What sort of cost would be involved?

FirstSpot has been pretty solid so far, and based on usefulness and responsiveness of your support forums posts, and my initial testing and overall impression of the software, it seems like a good fit.

I'm going to do some portal mockups and try to present this to management for budget approval next week.

We have a new cafe opening in Manhattan this month, and I'd really like to roll this out there at the beginning.

I've made kind of a big deal here about the risk to reputation we bear having unsecured wireless, and how important email verification is in managing that risk, as it provides a channel to communicate with the user that we otherwise don't have.

I can't just stand up in the cafe and shout "Will the user with mac address 6C-62-6D-3F-42-62 please identify yourself so I can tell you what you did wrong?"

I did get preliminary buy in from management, but it's going to make budget approval a little more difficult if I back away from the position that email verification is a required feature.

[alan]

We can definitely do that. For the actual customization pricing, please email us at firstspot@patronsoft.com. We want to know the potential size of your project before we can decide a price, thanks.
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~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[robertfranz]

I sent an inquiry this afternoon.

I'm curious to see the response - we're pretty small, but I think there is potential there, and a lot of possible sales once the feature is supported.