Advice on Registration Approaches

[Alex Rice]

On Sunday, January 12, 2003, at 07:07  PM, Igor de Oliveira Couto wrote:
> Right now, NOTHING - that is why I TRULY need some guidance! I know 
> that the registration process, like so many other factors, can heavily 
> influence the success of a new software release, and I do not have the 
> time/money to 'try out' several different technologies and strategies 
> to see which one works best!

Another thing to consider is that there is no cracker-proof 
registration scheme. Keeping that in mind, you have to balance the 
choice based upon:

- how much time and effort you have to put into making the registration 
scheme good.
- how difficult you make it for the user as a side effect of the 
registration scheme.

I think Kagi and eSellerate offer particularly good services because 
they handle the ecommerce and side of things for you (a huge time 
saver) and offer a variety of serial number generation schemes.

A particularly easy one to implement is to use a message digest (SHA, 
or MD5) of a string that can be generated at run-time to compare with 
the the user's digest key.

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com