NIE in digital age

Thomas, when I was working at a newspaper group, we settled on setting up an account for each teacher, with a specific username format (school-teacher) and set the concurrent user limit on their account to 50-ish. We then created a specific subscription service that was good for 1 year. This worked out pretty well for those papers.

What about using a "Domain" subscription? This way teachers can create their own accounts that will automatically get behind the paywall without y'all having to do a bunch of work to create them.

I suggested the domain method ... but around here the entire school system (students, teachers, administrators) all have the same domain and management wasn't about to give access to every employee at one of the counties biggest employers free access.

We built a tool years ago that works well with just one account we never have to touch.

In a nutshell.....

We have all the IPs and ranges for each school and school systems in a MySQL table.

Users hit a PHP page we built on the /app/  server that inspects the incoming IP address.

If in the list, the page reloads, redirects and takes the user to our NIE static page with just links to eedition and our main site.

Once validated and redirected, the tool drops a cookie and the user is effectively logged in and are now behind the paywall.

Only time we have to touch it is if schools change IPs or a new group/school signs up.

Circ handles the 'subscriptions' and they update me of IP changes. 

A similar system is used to handle oddball situations where we want to let folks around the paywall.

This is used by libraries, gov entities, our own building network, etc.

In both cases, if users hit the /app/ page and are not on the list of approved IPs, they are redirected but with no cookie drop, they are not logged in and are behind the paywall. This prevents teachers and students from going home and attempting to use the same /app/  URL to attempt a validated login. The redirect happens but they are not logged in.

It could be portable or built right into everyone's /app/  server without much fuss but I doubt TN would ever take it on.

I've been waiting for a Weather Closings system for over 5 years now. Connected to the Business Directory, and User Dashboard and Calendar, it would be easy to do and incredibly powerful with tentacles hooked into many aspects of BLOX.

that setting appears to be site-wide I take there are no options to only IP whitelist portions of the site?

We have more targeted support for that coming late this year.