How To Do the License Thingy
 

I'll be doing a site where I need people to have licenses to download content. Just one problem. Yeah, how do you do that?

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That's probably too terse. What I want to do is offer skins for download, maybe even have a shopping cart. I'm just not sure of the best way to go about it. I don't really have a starting point to do a decent Google search.

charge a yearly fee for access to a downloads section.

That seems to be the most common method, at least, from what I've seen. Thing is, I'm not sure if folks are using vB core and modifying it, or if they're using something else, like Joomla or another CMS (since a lot of them do more than vB styles). I don't want to make things harder on myself than they need to be, but, I'm willing to go the extra mile if it's more efficient in the long run.

What I've seen so far seems to pretty much be a basic shopping cart. But what steps are they taking to ensure the use of the license, if any? Ideally, I'd like to do something like vBulletin does with the members area and their licensing restrictions. But, I don't really know how far you can go with enforcing licensing restrictions on a style. I mean, I've seen some of extremePixels stuff bootlegged before, and I wonder if there's not really much you can do to prevent pirating when it comes to styles. I know the couple of skins I made here were on a half dozen different websites within a week of posting.

You can't stop it unfortunately.

No, no expectation of stopping it. Just wonder if there are steps to curb it. Is it pretty much just an open season thing?

vbcover.com - icart system.

Thank you. I'll give them a look/see.

I think I know what you mean!

I'm not sure what its called but there is examples on both of these sites.

http://vbadvanced.com
http://www.v3arcade.com

Maybe anyone who looks at it will know what its called or what it involves

Well, at least in vBadvanced's case, Brain is an advanced (pardon the pun) developer. So I doubt he very likely developed his licensing system himself. I've actually seen a couple here, but not sure if they're still around anymore. None of my search terms could turn them up. I think Darkwaltz had one when he was still doing vBCredits with PixelFX, but now that he's with DBTech, I'm not sure he still has one in the works. Hrm, (goes to search for DBTech threads.)