Advice on development
 

Hi all,

We have had a product out for quite a while that lets web masters bill end users mobile phone bills with premium sms text messages.

Unfortunatly when we developed it in the first place it was a bit tricky to use, because we required that the web site called our server to validate the username/password.

We are trying to make it easier to use by having our server call scripts on the web site that will add the username/password to the .htpassword file.

Does any one have any other suggestions for was to validate users?

Thanks.

Having your server send a request to a script on the site's server to add a username/password combination is probably the most standard way to do this (most - if not all of the other billing companies support this). As long as your scripts are solid, it would allow for a decent integration with existing sites.

Alternately, you could provide a login screen similar to the way AVS systems such as adultcheck, etc work. This would allow the webmaster to place a form on their site with a link to billing information, plus a place to enter in a username/password (or other day, say an auth code sent by your gateway to the SMS user). You could still offer some form of protection by using .htaccess on the site's side to protect the content using referrer and/or cookies, however this is trivial to get around - if someone wants in bad enough.

Either way, what *I* personally would like would be the choice of how I wanted to do it for my sites, plus a way to integrate it into our backend database (XML data interchange, etc) -- however that's beyond the scope of what most people need.

CGI