Limit active sessions with our new “Logged In” feature!
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Our-Hometown is happy to announce that we’ve released a new update granting our customers more control over subscribers visiting their website — most notably the ability to limit subscribers to a certain number of active sessions, serving as a deterrent to prevent readers from sharing their account with friends or family.
In the past, there was nothing stopping readers from buying a digital subscription and sharing their login with others, essentially robbing you of at least one potential subscriber and the revenue that comes with it. The standard solution of limiting IP Addresses was largely inefficient for this purpose, as the majority of readers access the news from their mobile phones and may be frequently jumping from one internet connection to another throughout the day as they travel from home to work, a library, or one of several other public WiFi connections. Each of these internet connections has their own IP Address; so you can see how a single subscriber could easily connect from five or ten different locations in a given time period and find themselves locked out of their account.
With this new update, powered by the Logged In plugin, we can limit Active Sessions instead of IP Address. Using this method, a Session is created each time a customer logs in to their account. This session is tied to their device instead of their IP address, and remains active until the readers logs out, even if the reader switches between internet connections. You can choose how many active sessions a user is allowed at any given time.
There are a few different Settings that can be adjusted to achieve your preferred functionality. However, these settings will need to be adjusted by Our-Hometown’s Support Team, and we’ll discuss these options with you when we enable the plugin on your website.
We’ve set the maximum number of Active Sessions to Three (3) by default, but this can be changed if requested.
There are two options for handling what happens once a user reaches the maximum number of sessions:
1. Allow New Logins will allow the customer to log in without further intervention, but will terminate any existing sessions in order to do so. This means if a friend or family member had been logged in reading elsewhere, they will be instantly logged out. Likewise, if a friend or family member continues using the account, it won’t take long before you find yourself logged out as a result of someone else logging in. This quickly becomes an annoying game of tag and helps deter readers from account sharing.
2. Block New Logins will simply not let the customer log in until one of their previous sessions expires. If the reader is unable to access the device(s) that they’re already logged in with, they’ll have to wait until the session expires itself. By default, a session will expire after two days, but could take as long as two weeks if the customer had checked the “Remember Me” or “Keep Me Logged In” boxes when logging in.
Should a customer contact you unable to login due to having too many active sessions, we can enter their username in the Force Logout box to manually terminate any active sessions for that user. Once this is completed, the reader will be able to login again.
If you’re interested in trying out our new Logged In plugin update on your website to restrict users to a limited number of active sessions, please e-mail us at ops@our-hometown.com and request that we enable this for free!
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