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A number of years in the past I used to be working a Chinese language discussion board utilizing the preferred discussion board system in China, Discuz. Discuz has a really helpful consumer level system the place factors might be assigned to discussion board customers relying on how a lot they take part. Relying on what number of factors a consumer has, he’s granted completely different ranges of permissions to do various things reminiscent of viewing file attachments, broadcasting international “shout outs”, and so on. Discuz additionally included a characteristic the place customers should buy these factors by means of Alipay (China’s hottest on-line cost system). Nonetheless solely folks residing in China can use Alipay, so since all my financial institution accounts are Canadian, I had no option to monetize my discussion board by means of this level buying system.
I searched round within the Discuz official discussion board for a PayPal module which I might use outdoors of China, however had no luck. Nonetheless I did discover many different folks in the identical scenario looking for a similar factor. So I assumed possibly I might write this module and promote it, which I did, and made a few thousand {dollars} off it. The module was mainly a free obtain, nonetheless I added some primary authentication mechanism to it in order that the consumer can solely use it for 10 instances earlier than the module locks up. It’s going to grow to be usable once more provided that the consumer buy a password from me that’s generated from the consumer’s area identify, so one buy is simply usable for one area. This authentication piece was encoded with Ioncube so {that a} typical consumer can not simply neutralize it.
Sadly the Discuz platform upgrades so regularly that my plugin quickly required replace. I initially wrote the plugin for Discuz 6.0, however quickly Discuz 6.1 was launched. I up to date the plugin for six.1, then 7.0 was launched. I up to date the plugin for 7.0, however extra new variations had been launched, and now it’s Discuz X1! Lastly I noticed it’s a unhealthy enterprise mannequin anyhow that my product is predicated on one other firm’s product, so I made a decision to stop growth. My time is price greater than what I could make with the plugin if spent elsewhere.
Ethical of the story? Do not based mostly your product on product of another person, if their product turns into out of date so will yours. Nonetheless the upside is I’m now fairly good at programming for PayPal integration.