3 Ideas: Download Manager, Game Plugin, Point Thing

[bupaje]

A couple ideas for some future addons ... on one of my old site we had a significant problem with people linking directly to our tutorials and files. I came up with an idea to check the referring url and if it wasn't from my site I returned a page, with a link to the file but the page said something like "The file you have requested is made available by Visual Basic Explorer. You may click here to download the file or visit our Downloads Section to find many other original files on our award winning site."

This me to serve a banner on a branded page with our logo and other advertising on the page which paid for the bandwidth, and made it impossible for people to just wrap our content. A friend coded it for me as as ISAPI DLL.

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A second idea from the same site .... We modified some simple game scripts like hangman, a guessing game and one other -(can't remember, think it was a quiz game) and personalized them for the site. For example the site was for Visual Basic programmers and all the questions were VB related. People take breaks and not suprisingly these pages got huge numbers of hits which again served lots of banners and helped increase our link popularity ranking on some sites that measured that. If we could come up with 2-3 similar game mods that could be used to add custom questions/terms related to the topic of the site it might be useful for webmasters.
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The 'Point Thing' was from a contest we had on the site. It required registration and then we gave points for pages viewed, extra points for viewing special content like stuff from sponsors or other content we wanted them to see, new sections on the site, new downloads, and then once per day a popup for a 'Bonus 50' point would appear on some page which would give them those points if they found it and clicked it. We set a max number of points and set up a sort of 'flood protection' so they couldn't just keep reloading the same page. In our case each point was like a raffle ticket and at the end of the month we randomly selected a winner from those with more than x points. This generated huge amounts of page views during the contest.

Something like this might be useful to make a site fun as people try to find that popup 'bonus', reward visitors, help encoiurage people to visit certain pages and also for contests.

Sorry for the long post .....