Can this be done...

[paul260426]

When someone comes to my site...we will call this person '#1'... the program loads a banner/header depending on who they are. I suppose it would read their computer ID. I don't know, you tell me if this is possible.

So the banner reads: Welcome #1

Then the Discussion Board is loaded right below the banner. The banner never goes away the whole time the user is using the Discussion Board.

Is something like this possible....if so, how would I do it...what programming tools would I need to accomplish something like this????

 

[stscac]

When someone comes to my site...we will call this person '#1'... the program loads a banner/header depending on who they are. I suppose it would read their computer ID. I don't know, you tell me if this is possible.

So the banner reads: Welcome #1

Then the Discussion Board is loaded right below the banner. The banner never goes away the whole time the user is using the Discussion Board.

Is something like this possible....if so, how would I do it...what programming tools would I need to accomplish something like this????

Yes, there are many different ways to do this. A very popular method used by search engines to display more targetted advertisements is to target people by location. This is done by querying their ip address against a database that contains ip/location informaton. You can get a free ip/country database at http://www.ip2location.com.

I believe that you could also redirect (using php, and even javascript if you wanted) a user based on their browser or computer settings.

I am not particularly sure about a computer id, but I almost want to think you are talking about IP addresses.

Let me know if you need any more explaination or the answering of any other questions and I would be glad to help out.

-Steve

 

[rimian]

yes ip addresses will identify the user's location but these can change if they have a dynamic IP (a lot of dial up accounts have them). a session ID will identify the same person browsing through various pages on your site (if it's all on one server).

there's no way to know if #1 is called "Bill" or "Fred" unless you ask them. Once you do ask them however you can store this info in a cookie and read it everytime they come back to your site. of course if they are required to log in you can store all their info in your database and recall it later.

 

[cerebus]

The least server-intensive way to do it would be to save a cookie when the user first visits storing the banner filename the visitor sees. Then at every request check for that cookie (and its validity) and show the banner.

Another method, as mentioned before, is to check by IP. This would give some unwanted effects when the vistors are behind multiuser proxies, but also remove the problem that not everyone accepts cookies (even though the percentage that doesnt is very low).

As for determining physical location of the IP owner it can help in giving more relevant ads for the visitor, but is not very usable for your task.

 

[Porte]

The IP idea would be the most awful thing - there are so many dialup users out there.
Cookies too can be deleted from Internet history, and it will no longer identify the user..

I agree with ramian, there would be no way to know that user #1 is Blah, etc. So this is why a small login system is good in these cases, once logged in a session starts and identifies the user settings from mysql.

Regarding targeted ads, this is possible, showing ads to specified country, or even redirect people depending on their location, that's possible. But you can't know if user A is user A unless he identifies himself.