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Is this even possible?

PostPosted: September 14th, 2011, 2:54 am
by wilson765
First may I say how brilliant s2 is. I am new to it but already converted.

I am building a elearning membership site and would like to sell courses in which the time diminishes as the student is logged in. Typically a course will start with 40 hrs on the clock which is used up as the student is logged in working through the course. Once the time has run out the college would need to pay again for their student to log in.

I am having to do it like this because we sell via colleges who will simply give a new student the log in details for a student who has already completed the course. Each student has to be given a year to complete the course and they often do it within a month so you see the college can use the other 11 months for more students. By having diminishing hours we can stop this and protect our revenue.

I'm not sure this is even possible. Your thought would be really welcome.

Thanks

Steve

Re: Is this even possible?

PostPosted: September 14th, 2011, 5:04 am
by Harty
If schools are breaching your agreement and causing you to lose 90% of your income, then you need to have business meeting with them to straighten this out. When companies abuse systems such as your they put companies like you out of business, and when that happens who might they go to if you are no longer there. Makes my blood boil to hear things such as this. But what to do?
One issue you have is the risk of simultaneous logins, more than one person using a single user name and password at the same time. An ip restriction may be able to prevent this. See: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/se ... eous+login

To restrict time on your site, consider:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sho ... e-content/

There is also some useful info here:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=960&p=4549&hilit=Time+limited+membership#p4549

Re: Is this even possible?

PostPosted: September 14th, 2011, 5:19 am
by wilson765
Thanks Harty for spending time and offering a thorough reply.

I don't think I'm managing to explain what I actually need though. (Maybe because it's not possible.) The best way to explain ii is to think of those games you can trial for an hour before you have to buy it. You have an hour which diminishes as you play. So you play for 20mins, log out and the next time you load it you have only 40mins left etc.

I need to sell a course that starts by allowing 40hrs access but counts down as the user is logged in. So if they study for an hour then the next time they log in they only have 39hrs left.

Certainly never come across is anywhere else, I just wondered if it would be possible.

Steve

Re: Is this even possible?

PostPosted: September 27th, 2011, 12:08 am
by Cristián Lávaque
Thanks for the kudos, Wilson! :)

You could probably create a customization like that. You'd have to store the time left in the school's profile with your site and update it as they use the content.

You'd need to decide how to count the time, too, since a page can be viewed for 3 secs or 5 hours and still be one page served. Would you assign each page served a certain "average" time or will you have a JavaScript chronometer? The JS solution is easily avoided, the other one may not be fair.