Professional Web Design, Hosting and Marketing Services in Marbella
Free SMS Service Application Updated
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Okay, a while has passed since I last updated our free sms system on marbellaguide.com, its been working pretty well, a few abusers but time as usual to update it a little.
www.marbellaguide.com/sms
Initially there were alot of users who would bypass the registration procedure by using throw away email and thus no way for us to control the siege of users flaunting the security bypass.
We did end up blocking multiple signups with ip adresses etc but that was inconvenient to people who were signing up from universities etc. We also blobked inups from free accounts like hotmail or google but that just annoyed alot of people and in general I would receive quite a bit of hate mail.
So, we had to think of a better way to get authentic users signing up without putting up too many barriers.
Mobile Phone SMS Verification
Recently we have changed the registration procedure so that users have to authenticate themselves by sending an sms message to their mobile phone. At sign up, the user enters their mobile phone number and a message is sent to the users phone containing a short code which the users then have to enter on the verification page so that we know that the user is at least "semi authentic".
We are discovering that some people amazingly have two or three phones and sign up with several accounts despite the policy being that you can only have one account per user but we catch them pretty quick and block their accounts.
This leads me onto the second verification process which I have not yet implemented but will be included in the next update, Email Verification.
In addition to mobile phone verification, I will be randomly asking users to verifiy their account information by sending an email to their email account. Hey, if they used disposable email, its their fault, at the end of the day when you register you should be honest.
Anyway, the system seems to work great, users both english speaking and non english speaking seem to be able to sign up and verify themselves no problem.
We currently sign up appx 50 nw users per day.
