4 Free Professional handles the following aspects of your email-based membership site:

• New member signups
• Survey management
• Affiliate signups
• Affiliate hit tracking
• Affiliate stats
• Admin functionality - search/edit users, send mass mail, payout reports, etc.

This manual outlines each of those topics. To avoid confusion, it should be stated up front that 4 Free utilizes both PHP and Perl scripts. PHP is used primarily for the "front end," especially where cookie tracking is needed. Perl is used for the "back end," such as form processing, stats calculation, and other work-intensive activity. You do not need to know either language in order to use 4 Free, but you should be aware that it uses both.

New Member Signups

Signups to your site are handled by the join.php and join.cgi scripts. As is true across the 4 Free package, the PHP script handles the entry and the Perl script handles the form processing. Somewhere on your site's main page, you'll obviously want to place a link for surfers to sign up. That link should point to join.php, for example,

<a href="join.php">Click Here to Sign Up Now!</a>

You should always link to join.php, and never to join.cgi. The join.cgi script is the form post action for the signup HTML template.

When a new member completes the signup form, a welcome email is sent to the email address they provided. The member must click the verification link inside of this email, which points to 4 Free's val.pl script. Upon verification, the member is added to your site's .htpasswd file immediately, and the referring affiliate (if any) is credited for generating a signup. This verification process ensures that members provide a real, valid email address at which they can actually receive mail - and at which they will start receiving your own mailings.

Optionally, you can set 4 Free to remove a member's access if he or she unsubscribes from your mailing list. This setting is the default and is strongly recommended. With 4 Free configured in this manner, the referring affiliate (if any) for an un-subscriber will be debited for 1 signup. This prevents affiliates from simply signing themselves up and unsubscribing over and over to defraud the system. It also encourages affiliates to continue sending you as much traffic as possible, in order to compensate for any un-subscribers.

Survey Management

4 Free Professional includes a module which allows you to force members to answer survey questions the first time they access the members area. Some users will find this feature useful and others may not; if you don't have a need for this feature, you can skip this section.

A survey can be a helpful way for you, the site operator, to determine basic demographic information about your membership. For example, you might set up a survey which asks for the member's sex, age range, income bracket, profession, etc. Responses to these types of survey questions can help you tailor the content on your site to what appeals to the largest portion of the membership. Of course, you can ask any questions you like, you don't have to gather demographics. You might ask your members which type of pics they prefer, what their favorite color is, or anything else you're interested in.

If you set up a survey, it will be presented to each new member the first time they access the members area (they won't be able to access the actual members content until they complete the survey). Please note that this is a per-member event, not a per-survey event; if you decide to create a new survey, existing members will not see it. See Step 7 of the installation guide for instructions on creating a survey and setting up your members area to support it.

To view survey results, simply access your installed copy of surveyadmin.php (you may have renamed it during installation) in your browser.

Affiliate Signups

4 Free Professional features its own built-in comprehensive affiliate program, whereby surfers can sign up as affiliates and earn money for each membership they generate. Affiliate signups are handled by affiliate_signup.html and affiliate_signup.cgi (there is no PHP component). If you'd like to use the affiliate program functionality, you should place a link to the HTML file somewhere on your site. For example,

<a href="affiliate_signup.html">Make Money With Our Affiliate Program!</a>

Upon completing the affiliate signup form, a welcome email is sent to the new affiliate. The affiliate is given a link to the Webmasters' Lounge, where he or she can check stats, get banners and link codes, etc. The Webmasters' Lounge is handled by the webmasters.cgi script, and you can link directly to that script from within your site. For example,

<a href="webmasters.cgi">Current Affiliates Login Here</a>

Note: Assuming you'll be using the affiliate program, you should edit the HTML templates in 4 Free's templates/affiliates directory. Providing banners and other promotional materials is up to you.

Affiliate Hit Tracking

All hit tracking and stats tabulations for your affiliates are done automatically. Each affiliate is given a special link code which includes a variable named "ref" whose value is the affiliate's ID. Affiliates must send traffic to their special link code in order to be credited with hits or signups. For example, an affiliate with ID "bigbucks" should link to:

http://your.site.com/path/to/4free/?ref=bigbucks

When a surfer clicks through to your site via an affiliate's link, the affiliate is credited for a hit. The hit will be counted as unique if the IP address of the visitor has not visited the site recently, otherwise it will be counted as a raw hit; tabulations for both types of hits are displayed in the Webmasters' Lounge. In 4 Free's admin area, you can set the number of hours which must pass between visits in order for a new visit to be considered unique. The maximum - and the default, which is recommended - is 24 hours.

In addition, a cookie is dropped on each referred surfer's web browser. This cookie contains the ID of the referring affiliate, and is read in by 4 Free if the surfer actually signs up. What this means is that if an affiliate refers someone to your site, and the surfer then browses around to several pages before actually joining, the affiliate will still be properly credited. This tracking cookie lasts for a year unless deleted by the surfer, giving your affiliates the best possible opportunity to "lock in" their traffic.

In order to make all of this magic take place, you must do a little work up front. You might have already done this, as the following paragraph is included in the installation guide. However, the importance of this step can't be underscored enough; you must do it or else affiliate hit tracking won't work. Here's what to do:

You'll need wrap all of your front-end HTML inside of the code contained within 4 Free's "blank.php" script. This is easy to do. For each page you plan to put up, first make a copy of blank.php and open it up. Paste the HTML code at the end of the file, after the ?> tag, and make sure to keep the .php extension. For example, let's say you want to put up a 3-page preview tour on your site. You'd need to make three copies of blank.php, rename them (e.g. tour1.php, tour2.php, tour3.php), then open each one and paste the appropriate HTML at the bottom of the file. For an actual example of how this should be done, open up the index.php that came with 4 Free. You'll see that it contains the PHP code from blank.php at the top, and the HTML of the index page at the bottom.

Affiliate Stats

Affiliates can login to the Webmasters' Lounge at any time to check their stats. The current month's stats page is the default display when an affiliate logs in, and he or she can navigate back and forth through previous months' stats if desired. Stats pages display the total number of raw hits, the number of unique hits, the number of signups generated, the number of deductions (i.e. members who signed up and then unsubscribed from the mailing list), and the overall ratio of hits to signups. The ratio is counted against unique hits, not raw hits.

In the Lounge, affiliates can also add, view, and delete sites which they'll be sending traffic from. This is not a requirement; that is, affiliates to not have to add any sites to the database. This feature is primarily a placeholder for future versions of 4 Free, which may include the ability to break down stats by referring domain.

Admin Functionality

4 Free Professional provides a powerful administrative area which allows you to perform the following tasks:

Search for a user or affiliate

The member and affiliate searches allow you to generate a list of matching members or affiliates based on search criteria you specify. You can choose to search the email address, name, sex, city, state, ZIP code, and more to locate users or affiliates.

List all users or affiliates

With these options, you can quickly view all of your members or affiliates at a glance. The generated lists can be resorted by name, email address, and referer or affiliate ID.

Edit or delete user or affiliate records

After searching for or listing members or affiliates, you can modify or delete each user's record.

Among other things, this allows you to set different payout rates for different affiliates. For example, if a particular affiliate is sending you a ton of signups, you might want to thank him by setting his payout rate a bit higher than everyone else's. You can also use this functionality to update the mailing address for affiliates who move, delete affiliate or member accounts, etc.

Mass email all your members

This is where you'll be spending a lot of time! The ability to send mass email to all of your members is probably your primary reason for using 4 Free. When members sign up, they are consenting to receive promotional mail from you. Use this to your advantage by sending out mail frequently.

When sending mail, you can specify both a text version and an HTML version of each message. If you are sending a text-only message, leave the HTML portion of the form blank. If you're sending an HTML message, you should fill out the text portion with either a text-only rendition of the HTML message, or a note specifying that the actual message is in HTML format.

Mass email all your affiliates

You can use this form to send affiliate program updates, site announcements, etc. to your affiliates. We suggest reserving promotional mailings for members only, and mass mailing your affiliates only when there is relevant site information. The text and HTML fields should be used as described in the previous paragraph.

Generate payout reports

Here you can generate a report listing which affiliates are owed how much.

Payout reports come in two flavors, web based and hard copy. The web based report is browseable and meant to be reviewed on the web. The hard copy report is meant for actual payment processing, and can be created in several formats - comma separated, tab delimited, or pipe delimited. After generating a hard copy report, you can either download it from the server or automatically have it emailed to you. The CSV and tab delimited formats allow for easy importing into accounting programs like QuickBooks, or external databases like Access, if you use these types of programs to manage payment information.

System Setup

This is the web-based configurator for 4 Free. From here, you have the ability to set all variables and config options used by 4 Free. This allows you to tweak the system settings without having to manually edit and re-upload configuration files; the configurator automatically creates new config files each time you use it.

Backups of both Configs.pm and config.php are also created each time you use the configurator (this assumes that the backups/configs directory is chmod 666 or 777, as specified in the installation guide). If you accidentally mess up your settings, you can either run the configurator again or you can run the backup_wizard.php script in the admin directory. The backup_wizard.php will attempt to restore old config backups even if the admin.cgi script won't run.

If you haven't done so already, please be sure to password protect the admin directory. You don't want others to have access to these features!