I'm a third party trying to assist someone in adding your code to their site. I do not want their user name and password, nor should they be quick to give it to me.

I very well could have helped them to get an additional tool on their site, had your forums been open for anyone to browse the support subjects.

Since they aren't, my suggestion will be to move to a forum that is either free, or at a minimum does not lock their knowledge base from the casual viewer.

While assisting people on several different boards, I've noticed only a few that do as you do, and hide the information.

This can harm your business model. It's lost you at least one customer thus far.

Hi,

It's understandable that a customer doesn't want to hand out their login information. For this reason, we have an 'alternate contact' option. The client simply needs to log into our client area, and add you as an alternate contact. You'll then be able to log in with your own set of credentials, submit support tickets and by extension, browse the support forums here, too :)

Hope that helps,

Rikki

browse the support forums here, too :)

I thought that alternate contacts would not be given access to the IPS Resources forums?

Unless now they just have viewing permissions?

They have access - they do not have access to the customer lounge since they are not technically a customer, but they can have access to the support forums for the products they were given permission to access in the client area.

alternate accounts are utterly useless imho! root and non-root admins and not the owners usually belong to this alternate group. we need access to everything but the site owners account to run the forums efficiently, let them take care of paying for upgrades etc.

lol im back to using the owners accounts now ( this isnt my alternate acct) so this alternate contact is a complete waste, if you cant trust the alternates then just remove it or add something admins can really use!

Alternate contacts have access to all of the support areas. The only place alternate contacts don't really have access to is the "Customers lounge" which is just meant as a general hidden chat area. What areas do you not have access to as an alternate contact that you do as the account owner, besides this one forum?

What areas do you not have access to as an alternate contact that you do as the account owner, besides this one forum?

Downloads of the products.

Downloads of the products.

That's right. Although I trust to my alternate contacts I don't want to allow download software other persons than me.

That's right. Although I trust to my alternate contacts I don't want to allow download software other persons than me.

That is your oppinion. Let us say I am the IT employee to the Gigawidget Co. I doubt the company would want me to have access to their billing information and I doubt accounting would be able to figure out how open a zip let alone how to FTP up to the server. Beside that, accounting would say it is not in teir job description to download and then email the zip to the IT department.

Can you see where having a second level of alternate contacts with access to the downloads might be advantageous.

See, that's a clearer description of what you're looking for.

I'm not sure what management will want to do (or not want to do) about this, but at least there is something more for them to go on. I wanted to make sure there weren't permissions issues here/resources site.

We do understand the need to allow alternate contacts to download the software, and that's how we used to have it. Unfortunately, people were adding their friends as alternate contacts, though, and allowing them to download the software too - essentially backdoor piracy. For that reason we decided to disallow it going forward.

We do understand the need to allow alternate contacts to download the software, and that's how we used to have it. Unfortunately, people were adding their friends as alternate contacts, though, and allowing them to download the software too - essentially backdoor piracy. For that reason we decided to disallow it going forward.

And I bet these people now just download and EMail their friends the zip...

I found the easiest way for me to handle a situation like this was for the company to download the file and upload it to a non public directory on the web server. I just snagged the file and uploaded it to install or upgrade. Just make sure its non public :).