Token Sites
What is a Token Site?
A token site is an alternative to a membership site in NATS; it requires surfers to purchase tokens in order to gain access to member content, instead of subscribing to a time-based membership.
In a token site surfers will be able to go back to the NATS join form and purchase additional tokens under their same username, as opposed to having to re-register when their membership expires. NATS will keep track of the total number of tokens that a member has purchased. In order to keep figures accurate, you can then post to NATS so it deducts the corresponding amount of tokens a member has used in your system.
Posting to Signup
NATS also offers the ability to send a surfer through the NATS pre-join form without the surfer needing to see that form. The only required data here would be the token option and cascade.
To do this, simply redirect the surfer to the join page with the following variables:
&signup[optionid]=<TOKENOPTION>&cascade=<CACADEID>&nats=<NATSCODE>
If you wish, you can also optionally add all of the other member information fields to be submitted, such as username, password, and e-mail address.
This option is very useful, as you can use it to send members that have already purchased tokens back to the join form, while still being able to use their same username.
When a member is created in NATS, they are assigned a token_hash that is passed in all of the postbacks created by NATS. The post to reuse an already registered username MUST contain the original username, as well as either the matching e-mail or matching token_hash. The following provides examples of both:
&signup[username]=<USERNAME>&signup[email]=<EMAIL> or &signup[username]=<USERNAME>&signup[token_hash]=<TOKENHASH>
Deducting Tokens
In order to deduct tokens from a member's account the post must come from an IP listed in the SECURE IPS array; the currently configured secure IPs can be found in the Configuration Admin in the "Security Configuration" section. This post will be made to the update_token.php script to update member records.
Please keep in mind that you MUST post usernames or memberids, and you MUST also post the session or token_hash. When you have done this, include the token_change as the amount of tokens to add or remove.
For example, the following code will remove 5 tokens from the user "testtoken":
http://linkdomain/update_token.php?username=testtoken&token_hash=c83d33a154692abe82db18a851fb197c&token_change=-5
