How does the MAKE: Bootstrapper's Handbook paywall work?
Does anyone know how @levelsio does the paywall and text obfuscation on makebook.io's?
I'd love to implement something similar on a small project I'm starting. I'm particularly interested in how to 'unlock' live content once a purchase is made.
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He actually open sourced how he did it. Here's a link to the tweet & code: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/978243288707710981?s=20
Amazing! Thank you!
Just from a quick look, the text is obfuscated before it gets to the 'front-end' - likely so you can't read the whole book from the network tab.
It's difficult to guess the exact process without buying it myself, but setting an authorization header, cookie, etc. after a successful stripe purchase and rerequesting the content immediately would work if you want the whole text readable on the landing page. I think it's pretty likely you're just emailed a link to read/download the full text after a purchase.
As far as the obfuscation process, it's likely at some point they found every non whitespace character and had it replaced with a random letter. It's obfuscated the same for everyone so is likely just part of the landing pages html and not dynamic content at all!
Ah that's actually a really good way to think about it! It makes total sense that the obfuscation wouldn't be variable.
Thanks for the hints - they're really helpful
Just thinking it through; if all the text is returned from the backend, I cannot imagine it to difficult to obfuscate with some library (some cipher).
There must be some kind of cookie indicating a paying user if it does not require any logging in.
A cookie makes sense but how would you reissue a cookie if the cache was cleared?
That's a very good point. Have you purchased the book? I'm curious what the full flow is.
I know a friend who has a paid vs. not paid version for their application, there isn't an official login or registration. He created an input for someone to put their Gumroad license key and then it validates against a database. So there is some backend work going on, but it's not a full-bodied API or anything.
I bought it and I got a unique URL that I could use to access the book. So no cookie is needed, and I can access the book on different devices.
I've not purchased it, no.
A gumroad license key verfication system seems like a pretty easy way to do it. I suppose you could also do it on email and verify against a gumroad sales list. People could share the same email but that's the same as a license key.
You may want to move this to the
Developersgroup, just fyi. Sorry that I can't help with this one :/This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
When you purchase a copy are you directed to a PDF or a landing page with the content? I'm really interested in the flow of purchasing
Presumably you also have a way of accessing the book again if you deleted a locally stored version?
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.