Loyalist

About

Loyalist uses simple, non-invasive techniques to help site administrators identify site "loyalists". By default, a loyalist is defined as a user who visits the site three times or more in one week. The number of visits, duration, and "cooldown" time between visits can be modified via configuration.

Requirements

No special requirements.

Recommended Modules

• Rules: When enabled, the Loyalist module provides two Rules events:

  • After a visitor is defined as a (new) loyalist.
    This event will be dispatched after (or soon after, see LIMITATIONS) a visitor is newly defined as a loyalist.

  • A loyalist visits the site.
    This event will be dispatched when a known loyalist visits the site again.

Installation

Install as you would normally install a contributed module for your version of Drupal.

Configuration

Configure user permissions in Administration » People » Permissions:

• Administer Loyalist
  Users need this permission to access and configure the Loyalist module's settings.

The site's loyalist definition can be configured from Configuration » People » Loyalist.

• Interval (default: one week)
  The amount of time to look at when evaluating the Number of visits from a potential loyalist.

• Number of visits (default: 3)
  The number of visits by a single site visitor within the Interval to qualify the visitor as a loyalist.

• Visit cooldown (default: 30 mins.)
  Amount of times between page loads before considering a page load to be a new visit.

Functionality

The Loyalist module sets two variables for visitors in a loyalist session array. This array is primarily intended for other module and theme developers to build from.

• loyalist (integer)
  The loyalist session variable will be either 0 (not a known loyalist) or 1 (a known loyalist).

• Drupal 7: invoke (string); Drupal 8: event (object)
  The name of a Rules event that should be invoked (Drupal 7) or the event being dispatched (Drupal 8). See README.md file for more information.

Limitations

The Loyalist module uses the Javascript construct LocalStorage to record and process information about individual users. This module does not store any information on the server, personal or otherwise, about visitors. This is an intentional decision to avoid potential privacy invasive techniques like fingerprinting.

This approach has a couple of drawbacks that are import to understand:

• Users can disable or limit access to LocalStorage (e.g. in a private browsing mode). This effectively prevents the Loyalist module from functioning for that user/session.

• Users can modify LocalStorage data. The functionality of the Loyalist module should never be used for things like access to sensitive information or site configuration.

• Rules event invocations are delayed. Because loyalist status is determined client-side in Javascript, event invocations for the Rules module are delayed until that status can be communicated to PHP (server-side).

Sponsorship

Development of this module is supported by Cascade Public Media for KCTS9.org and Crosscut.com.