Problem

With most sites these days, regardless of their purpose, you need to know who your users are. You might need to know this so that you can restrict where the users go on your site. Or you might need this information so that you can provide a dynamic experience to your user. No matter what your reason is to know who your users are, the task of identifying and controlling them has a few basic requirements.

In order to get to know our users, we will need a way to register them on our site. This would give us a footprint for that user, which we can use each time the user returns. The registration process is fairly straightforward most of the time. We need to capture the data that we are interested in (such as username, password, email, and so on). We need to make sure that we store their password properly so that their identification is safe not only from the other users of the site but also from the administrators and staff of the site. Also, given the amount of fraud and spam on the Internet these days, we need to equip our site with some form of intelligence to guard it from automated registrations. In another attempt to protect the site, we need to make sure that our users are providing us with valid information. We can do this by validating the email provided by them to check if it is a functioning account under their control. As part of the registration process, we also need to inform the user about our current terms and conditions so that they know the rules of our site up-front.

Once a user has successfully registered, we will need to provide them with tools so that they can identify themselves to us each time they return. Rather than require the users to authenticate themselves to us at each and every page view, we should provide a centralized login screen. Upon successful authentication, we can track that user through the site. Knowing that users frequently forget the information that they provided us with, we will need to offer tools to remind the users how to get into our site with a password reminder feature. After the users have authenticated themselves, we would need to define where a user can go and what they can do on our site with some kind of permissions based system.

Once the users are registered and authenticated, we will need to provide them with a way to administer their account data. In addition to the users being able to administer their own data, the staff that runs the site will also need tools to manage all the users and their data. In addition to managing user data, administrators should be able to control the users' permissions and update the terms and conditions.