I see this very often in the UK where websites will let you signup by sending a text to a number, I have never seen an option for this in the USA do you know if there are any company's for the small time guys in the US that can provide this service?
http://google.com/search?q=sms+short+codes+usa
http://www.usshortcodes.com/
http://www.textmarks.com/
etc...
Try Zong (Switzerland), or EVP (Lithuania), they both provide US short codes.
In the US, Premium SMS requires double-opt-in, which drastically reduces the conversion rates.
Dan.
Related
I have few apps in PlayStore. A user(fake probably) is leaving negative reviews in all of my app. I want to know his email id/or any mode of contact by which i can contact/recognise him/her. Is it possible?
No, and if it was possible it would be a huge privacy violation for that user. You have two things you can do though:
if the reviews are abusive, then you can flag them
you can reply to the review in the Play Console. If you leave a polite reply asking them to give more detail, apologizing for any problems, and give them a way to contact you, then they might contact you. If they don't contact you, then at least anyone who sees the bad review can see that you care about customer service. Then they can guess that the review might be unfair, and your good, polite customer service might be a bigger positive than any negative effect of the review.
I use intuit merchant services - customers pay me with credit card after I send them an email with a link to pay, and everything works with no problem. However, my problem is that the link webpage structure is very outdated and some customers have told me that it doesn't look trustworthy, which I have to agree.
Is there any solution to this, like creating a user interface or a app that I can actually have developed to make this links a little bit more to look like my website so customers don't feel they ever left my website?
Thanks.
You should be careful with this idea. I am not a legal professional and am in no way attempting to give legal advice, but doing what you are suggesting can be illegal in some cases. Some sites disguise their payment screens in a similar way for malicious purposes in a manner called phishing, and there may be little legal differentiation between doing so with good or ill intent.
I don't think this is possible but here is what you actually can do:
Ask your Payment-Website about an API, then you might be able to change the layout.
Inform your customers about the situation and that they will be redirected of whatever you do.
Get a SSL-Cert for your website.
Find another way to receive payments in a trustworthy way
I employ email validation to grant people full use of the site. The trouble is, sometimes these emails get spam-boxed, or never arrive, so I get many people complaining that they cannot confirm their account.
Was wondering if there are other (creative) ways to offer secondary validation option to users who didnt get the validation. Its a free site, so I dont want to ask for credit cards, or mobile #s.
The purpose of this is to make abuse of the site less rampant, since we ban a lot of people, and they come back with dozens of accounts to prove something. Spam/robot registrations are not an issue (right now).
What we started doing recently was letting members send us an email to a special email address. We give them a hash code, and all they have to do is put that code somewhere in the subject or the body of the email, and send it to us. We have a cron job running in the background that gets those emails, parses the subject/body looking for the hash, and if found activates the account.
It doesn't work 100%, because some ISPs also block their users from sending us emails, but no solution would work 100%.
Based on your comment in Rob S.' answer, it sounds more like you want to identify situations where the same browser is creating multiple accounts rather than confirm that what's at the other end is human.
Dropping a cookie in the user's browser can be very helpful in finding the repeat offenders, especially those not savvy enough to clear their cookies or visit while in private mode. Some forum software like vBulletin does this and can notify the administrators when it happens.
Another alternative might be browser fingerprinting, which is where you use a bunch of the information provided in the HTTP exchange. An example of this is the EFF's Panopticlick.
Just got a "fun" new way to annoy your banned people a bit.
once you ban them (I guess you close the account and ban the IP). Then log their browser agent string with their IP and screen resolution.
If there is a match when showing the website to them. Just remove the registration link/page. Dont even show the link to the page, as it might piss them off. Dont explain why its gone. Just keep it gone, eg. for 3 weeks or 2 month.
That way they dont have a cookie on the browser to remove, they cant find the registration so they cant know WHY they cant make a new account.
Secondly, if on a school or something (dont know how old they are), the other existing users will still be able to login to their accounts as its ONLY registration that has been removed. Not login.
How about that? is that clever enough?
Basically what you're looking to do is separate the humans from the robots. There are two primary ways to do this:
1) Require users signing up to check boxes and type a word spelled out in an image captcha. These are usually very difficult tasks for a computer to complete.
2) Allow users to sign-up using their account from a different site such as OpenID or Google assuming that anyone who has one of these accounts is a real person.
I recommend combining both methodologies.
Good luck!
There are unlimited ways of doing this.
You mention mobiles and free, but if you have access to a SMS-gateway, you can receive SMS-messages for free (but might need to pay some sort of monthly subscription though). But show a dynamically generated code the the current user. Store this code in "his session" and do an ajax check each 15-30 sec to see if the sms-code was received by the gateway. If so, accept the account and let them registrate. This would requiere the gateway + your users to have a personal mobile. Enough about mobiles...
Make a question or more that is randomly generated. Use pictures/tokens instad of tekst so that the user has to press the correct image in correct order to perform some sort of answer.
Could be like a jackpot-machine with 3 cells where the images are randomly placed and generated inside dynamic named files, so that robots cant analyse the names to guess the right answer.
You mention e-mails to be easy to spoof. Yes indeed, but what if the emails would come lets say each week containing some sort of "important info" that the user would need to read/use on the website to continue. Once the account hasnt been used for a certain time (lets say 3 month, kill it)... and you could also say to have a "free account" you must accept that we send you 1 mail pr. month that you need to activate within 1 week. If you dont, we are free to close/delete your account details.
... and many more
I dont know what you want to "protect", but if its for gaming, then dont let the gamers have "extra levels/weapons" until they have provided a certain amount of these codes OR paid for access OR validated by phone or something.
Thats my first 3 ideas, I think the possibilities are unlimited. The main issue here is, make it too hard to validate yourself and the users go away unless your site is REALLY worth it.
You might think of the much used "Free forever (but limited)" approach way of selling stuff these days on the net. The users can make as many accounts they want, but the licens is still only "single/small/basic". Once you get more experienced, you get more features or you might just upgrade by paying... at this time you know WHO is real and WHO isnt.
My point is, dont over protect. Just design with the mind of spammers will always find a way in, no matter how good you protect it. Those giving up first are your real users/customers.
I would rather spend time on making this product/website/game so great that EVERYONE wants to pay for an account after a while.
Lastly from real life... there are COMPANIES in China with kids employeed to play World of Warcraft with one purpose. Harvest virtual gold and sell it on Ebay to other western players who pays with real dollars. Its not allowed according to the gamelicens and their accounts/gameslicenses are constantly getting banned. But it gives them so much income so they have calculated with this and they just buy new licences and continue.
So if EVEN Blizard(WoW creators)
doesnt have enough power/money to keep
fakes out of the game, how do you
expect to do much better? :o)
Usefull answer?
We are exploring the SMS Premium Voting similar like American Idol/Big Brother etc etc. How does SMS Premium Voting works technically? We are interested in how the data collected as far as I understand the third party company will collect the billing data from each Telco companies. Then it consolidate into a single data mining. Is this the right approach?
Or is it possible to get data from the destination number (the thing is we don't know how does it work so I don't know if this is possible or not).
We are actualy programmer and trying to get this data voting collected centrally or possibly raw data of the SMS but need more information on how does thing works.
I am appreciated your comment or feedback.
Thank you
One way this works is that the company that owns the number (either telco or a third party with agreements with telco companies) have a service set up so that each SMS received results in an HTTP request to a webserver of the cusomer's choice. Simplified "big brother" has a special page on their web site and the telco companies visit that page once for each SMS posting the SMS content. All filtering and calculations are then completed in the code for that page. Naturally you have to makesure that you ignore any requests from unexpected hosts to avoid voting tampering.
Is it possible to send a text message from a computer to a cell phone? I'd like to be able to do this with Ruby, not quite sure what it entails. After seeing GrandCentral and Google Voice, it seems like it's not that bad.
Is it possible? How do I get started!
Yes, it's fairly trivial.
Depends on whether you want to pay or not; some providers offer email addresses for each number that is with them, otherwise you can get an account with an SMS gateway (find one in your country, or try clickatell) and then just buy credits. They'll have various interfaces: Email, HTTP, more.
check smsroaming.com it provide services to send sms from website and also have desktop application for it. including iphone, blackberry and facebook application for it.
i hope they will help you to manage sms.
regards
Azy