Automatic Notification System

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Kayaker Magic
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Automatic Notification System

Post by Kayaker Magic »

Years ago, when I first started selling on the Kitely Market I asked about getting automatic notifications. PayPal and Second Life do this, see http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Direct_ ... ion_System

I also included this feature in my vending machines, they notify my server every time something is sold. (Vending machines in Kitely worlds cannot sell NOCOPY or NOTRANS items but in other grids you can use vending machines in more situations).

Way back when, Ilan told me that automatic notifications from the Kitely Market are possible but not a priority. Now years later he is saying the same thing. I'm going to become a squeaky wheel about this feature. Ilan says this is a feature that very few merchants would use, so I'm going to educate them about why they will want to use this when it becomes available. Then more merchants will want to use this and Ilan's self fulfilling prediction will be wrong.

The way this works is: Every time someone buys one of your items, an "HTTP Request" is sent to you over the Internet. This request has a bunch of information attached to it like what sold, who bought it, how much they payed, etc. To receive these you have to have a script waiting for it on a server somewhere. That is easier than you might think. If you have any simple WEB page, it can probably be set up to catch these notifications. You just need to add another text file script next to all the ones that make up your WEB page. The Second Life link above has examples in several computer languages. The hard part is what do do with the data, the preferred thing would be to save it in a database. So only merchants who have their own WEB pages, who can code scripts to get notifications (or crib one) AND who can write code to build a MySQL database can use this. Perhaps I see Ilan's point. He has given me a link to a site (https://ifttt.com) that can do this with emails, I'll give it a try and report back here what I learn.

But here are some things you can do with this:

I have products that use my server as part their operation. They store or fetch information over the Internet while they work. At the same time the server can check and see who is using them. Check if those people actually bought the item from me. I could have these items offer limited functionality, work for only a limited time, output links to where you can pay for a full version, output messages about copy-botting, refuse to work, or send me information to use in a DMCA take-down request. But if they bought it from the Kitely Market I cannot do this check. Kitely keeps their own database but I have to ask for a CSV file and transfer that data to my database by hand. So there is a delay (often quite long) between when someone buys something and when they show up in my database where I can do an instant check.

Here is an example product that uses this: I make Alpha HUDs for several of the popular mesh bodies (Ruth, Roth, Athena etc). My HUDs work just like the free ones that come with your mesh body, (although I think my user interface is beter), but they can also save transparency sets by name onto my server, load them by name, share them with your friends. However, they only let you save if you bought a copy. I can give these HUDs out for free and they become demo versions that work but don't save until you buy one. I can sell them COPY TRANS and let my customers hand them out to their friends because those also instantly become demo versions. If a copy-botter uses God mode to make themselves the creator of my HUD and tries to sell it as their own, it will only work as a demo version. Even re-writing the script won't help because half of the code (the save and load part) is on the server in the cloud and won't work until the customer is in my database. But for now I can't do all that and sell it in the Kitely Market. However, because these items are COPY MOD, I can and do sell them in vending machines in my Kitely Worlds.

I'm also have a lot of products that don't need the server as part of their operation. But I can add a simple call out to the server even in these products. Then the server could do all the checks listed above. A clever copy-botter could read the code, find this call and remove it. But if copy-botters were clever they would be making items of their own so I think this will happen very rarely. However, if I do this in a product sold on the Kitely Market, it might falsely accuse someone of being a copy-botter. So for now I only use this on products that I sell elsewhere.
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Re: Automatic Notification System

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Kayaker,

As I've explained in the IM I sent you about this, you can use IFTTT to turn incoming Kitely Market sale emails into HTTP/S calls into other services, including your own if you configure this properly. In other words, it may require an additional step for you to set up but the end result would be the same as if we'd called your service directly from our marketplace.
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Re: Automatic Notification System

Post by Kayaker Magic »

IFTTT has lots of pretty pictures and lots of examples using lots of social media that I never heard of. They have lots of pre-defined “connections” and “applets” for wiring all these social media together. I don’t use most of these social media so I don’t understand what half the examples are doing

I searched these anyway for connecting email to an http request and they of course don’t have exactly that handy. But I notice when I say “email to ...” they always show me something like “when I send an email to them, they can convert it to something else”, or “when some other social media does something, they can covert it into an email to me”. I need neither of those conversions. What I want is for when kitely sends me an email it is converted into something else. (An HTTP request). And it would be nice if it was only purchase notifications.

I don’t think that is possible, or very reasonable: Even if I give them access to my email account, they would have to poll it looking for messages from Kitely. They cannot poll very often so there would be a delay between when a Kitely email arrived and the next time they polled my email. My email comes from a small, mostly incompetent, WEB hosting service that does not have an option to notify third party services like the social media companies might have. I could have all my email sent to IFTTT, they could pass them all on to me, picking out the ones from Kitely on the way by. Not sure I want to do that or they will want to handle the bandwidth of doing that for very many people. So I don’t see how an external service like IFTTT can possibly do what I need.
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Re: Automatic Notification System

Post by Graham Mills »

It's been a (very long) while since I used this kind of feature but https://zapier.com/ (premium, alas) and https://www.integromat.com/en/ (freemium) have webhook apps that might be alternatives to IFTTT (via https://alternativeto.net/software/ifttt/, others listed) with 15 min polling.
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Re: Automatic Notification System

Post by Ilan Tochner »

The way I would set it up Kayaker would be to have an automatic mail forwarding rule in your email account to forward a copy of emails arriving from Kitely with the appropriate subject line to some gmail address you create for this purpose. You can then have whatever third-party service you use access that dedicated gmail account.

These may come in handy:

https://platform.ifttt.com/docs
https://medium.com/measuring-the-great- ... 20c6ed722d
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Re: Automatic Notification System

Post by Kayaker Magic »

So the way you say this might work is:
1) I add a rule to my email system to forward Kitley emails to
2) a new gmail account that I create
3) then have a third party service read that and convert it to an HTTP request to send to my server.
4) which causes the server to warm up and turn on its fan
5) the noisy fan wakes up a little dog that barks and that
6) startles a chicken into laying an egg which
7) rolls down a tube and breaks into a waiting frying pan
8 ) the smell of breakfast cooking wakes up a programmer who fell asleep on his keyboard.

It just occurred to me now that the famous American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor Rube Goldberg might also be of Jewish descent.
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Re: Automatic Notification System

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Never make an omelet in 3 easy steps when 30 will do :D
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