A few years ago, I used China's most popular forum system, Discuz, to run a Chinese forum. Discuz has a very useful user point system that assigns points to forum users based on the number of participants. Depending on the number of points the user has, he is granted different levels of permissions to perform different operations, such as viewing file attachments, broadcasting global "screaming", and so on. The discussion also includes a feature that users can purchase through Alipay [China's most popular online payment system]. However, only people living in China can use Alipay, so since all my bank accounts are Canadian, I can't profit from my forum through this purchase system.
I searched for a PayPal module on the official Discuz forum, which I can use outside of China, but no luck. But I did notice that many others are looking for the same thing in the same situation. So I think maybe I can write this module and sell it, I did it, and earned about a thousand dollars. The module is basically free to download, but I added some basic authentication mechanisms so that users can only use it 10 times before the module is locked. Only when a user purchases a password generated from a user's domain name from me will it be available again, so a purchase can only be used for one domain. This authentication piece uses Ioncube encoding, so typical users cannot easily neutralize it.
Unfortunately, the Discuz platform is frequently upgraded and my plugin will need to be updated soon. I originally wrote a plugin for Discuz 6.0, but soon released Discuz 6.1. I updated the 6.1 plugin and released 7.0. I updated the 7.0 plugin, but released more new versions, now it is Discuz X1! In the end I realized that this was a bad business model. In any case my product was based on another company's product, so I decided to stop development. If I spend it elsewhere, my time can be more than using a plugin.
The moral revelation of the story? Don't base your products on other people's products. If their products are outdated, your products will be outdated. But the advantage is that I am very good at programming the PayPal integration now.
Orignal From: Discuz PayPal Plugin - Online Sales Case Study
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