Stats and Referral Manager - Project Description and Overview

The Stats & Referral Manager project was initiated to solve a specialized problem for a client. The problem was that as a membership site, not only did the client want members to signup but also to provide special incentives for current members to refer the service to their friends. Therefore, once a member logged into their account, there needed to be a method for referring their friends that would not only track all referrals sent out but track referred members that signed up.

In addition to referral tracking, the application had to provide state of the art tools such as a specialized calculator, message center for posting, retrieving and managing private messages, a helpdesk system for tracking resolved and unresolved member support issues, access to business card templates for members, site banner management, FAQs management, typical account management support such as retrieve lost usernames and passwords and change passwords, cashout submittal and tracking, news and announcements section with an option to mark announcements as urgent so they will show up in the main member's area, member edit preferrances and edit profile options for customization and personalization.

• MySQL was chosen as the database to support the back end and Perl was chosen as the language of choice - although a few of the simpler features were implemented using PHP.
• For security reasons, the VPS hosting environment was setup to use several aliases to hide the location of directory and script names.
• The backend database currently consists of 22 separate tables to implement the relationships between the data entities.

What follows is a brief description of how some of the features were implemented:

Referral Management

Once a member signs into their account, they have access to the refer a friend tools consisting of options to send a new referral, view confirmed referrals, and manage unconfirmed referrals. When a new referral is sent out, the application saves the referral information into the referral table, which consists of who sent the referral, to whom the referral was sent, the date the referral was sent, and the custom text of the invitation composed by the member. The system composes an invitation with a custom link to the signup page which tracks a click to the member who sent the invitation. The member who sent the invitation will see all "unconfirmed referrals" in their member's area, as well as all confirmed referrals.

When a prospect receives the invitation and clicks the link provided, they launch a backend script that first sets a cookie on the prospect's PC containing the ID of the member who sent the invitation and then are forwarded to the site's signup page. If the prospect decides to signup right then and there, the signup script grabs the cookie and uses it to link this new member to the member who sent the invitation. This also works if the prospect decides to look around the site first before signing up.

A CRON job was setup to run every 4 hours to check if unconfirmed referrals signed up and insures that new members are connected to the referring member correctly, and which essentially keeps the referral table trimmed. Unconfirmed referrals are displayed in the member's area using data from the referral table, but confirmed referrals are tracked through the member table. Therefore, if a new member signs up, the system has to remove it from the referral table.

If a member's referral doesn't signup after a week or so, the member has the option of resending the referral using one of the refer a friend tools.

A member also has the option to create a personal landing page just for them. This personal landing page contains instructions about how to signup and other information necessary for a new member. The personal landing page gives each member a unique URL that they can post in email, forums, blogs, etc.

Administration

In addition to the tools designed for members, an administrative system was designed so that the administrator can easily do the following:

• configure the website
• post and manage announcements
• post and manage FAQs
• build promotions
• upload images for posting in announcements
• manage member accounts
• mass mail members
• manage the helpdesk
• manage member cashout requests

Of course there are many other features not described in this overview but this should be enough to get a feel for this application.

Overall this application took a year to build and test and currently is being used on 7 different sites to manage their memberships. There are around 5,000+ active members on the sites and grows at about 6-10 new members per day.