Metered Access - YourMembers/yourmembers GitHub Wiki

Metered access is a feature available in YM12 and higher, it's settings can be found in "content" -> General Settings however it should be considered an Advanced feature.

What is metered access

Metered access is a way of giving non logged in users a way to access premium content for free over a given duration. The best example of metered access is the NYT paywall which allows non logged in guests the ability to view 5 articles normally only subscribers could access in a given month. After they hit the 5 articles they are asked to subscribe and cannot view any more articles until the end of the month.

Metered Access can be a very powerful tool to help improve subscriptions however it is also a potential security hole as you are giving guests free access people may abuse this by circumventing the check on number of posts visited.

Metered Access makes use of cookies, which are placed on the Guests computer to manage if they have visited the site before and what content they have seen. While steps are in place to identify if a cookie has been tampered with or deliberately removed once on the guests browser it is out of the sites control and can be modified

Also metered access requires a greater then normal amount of tracking of peoples usage on the site which can cause privacy concerns. Metered access should therefore only be used on sites where these disadvantages are out weighed by the gains.

Setting up Metered Access

To setup metered access go to Your Members admin -> Content -> Global content options.

Click enable metered access

Note you can disable metered access at any time, guests will immediately no longer have access, however if you then re-enable it guest with cookies will resume to have access to the pages they originally had access to.

Once enabled you have the following options:

Views - Number of protected pages/posts the user can see as part of their metered access
Duration - The period of times views are counted in
Package Account Types - What level of access should they have while on metered access
Obey DNT - Obey Do Not Track Headers sent by browsers and deny access
Enable FCF - Allow GoogleBot same access level as metered user

Example - If views are set to 3 and duration set to 30 days, with package type "member" selected, then a guest visiting will be able to see 3 protected posts accessible by member in a 30 day period. After 30 days this resets.

Obey Do Not Track

Metered access makes use of cookies for tracking purposes this may make some users nervous, one possible way to remedy this is to enable DNT. When a browser has been setup to send a DNT header (this is supported by all major browsers) then the user will not be allowed access to metered content but also will not be cookied. This is inline with the guests wishes.

Enable First Click Free

Many membership sites wish to make use of FCF a mechanism to allow GoogleBot a way to search through protected content and index it, allowing it to show in search engines and guest arriving from search engines to be given the chance to see some content for free.

Warning This is an even bigger security risk then standard metered access as you will be giving Google the same rights as a user on the specified package account type. Anyone with enough technical knowledge to circumvent the useragent and IP checks will be able to gain access to this content.

Enabling this option and your content should appear in search engine results, however you may wish to prevent cached copies appearing by adding "< meta name="robots" content="noarchive" >" within your posts head for more information see http://noarchive.net/