what is "backend of a site seal" called on scriptlance?

October 17, 2009 7:15 PM

how do the online BBB seals and safety seal work on the back end?

I am trying to make a seal for members of an organization I am part of.

the Better business bureau has a seal which members put on their website with a code that links back to them.. which says when clicked upon "this is a member in good standing".

same things for site safety seals...

how do I create such a seal? i can go on elance or scriptlance, but I have no idea what I am trying to describe...

how hard is this to create, and how would i describe it best so I don't get taken for a ride?

I have the graphic.... I need the "CGI backend" or however it should be described.

Thank you MeFi!

posted by Izzmeister to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I would assume they're checking the referrer against a list of members-in-good-standing. It shouldn't be too hard to test this theory, I think.
posted by hattifattener at 7:51 PM on October 17

You mean something to prevent hotlinking of the image by people who aren't actually members? This is something you could easily do in your httpd config. Assuming apache, it would be something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?example\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png) /images/nohotlink.jpe [L]

Where you would have a line like the example.com line for every domain that is in fact allowed to hotlink. This is something that could go in a .htaccess file, and would be fairly trivial to write code to drop an additional line in automatically when somebody gets added as a member/partner/whatever.

A separate issue is people who copy the image and host it themselves. For that you have to pay somebody to routinely search for your image being used where it shouldn't be used and send DMCA takedown notices to those people's hosts... assuming they aren't hosted somewhere where that won't work, which describes a ton of sleazeballs, anybody serving from a botnet, etc. etc.

Having said all that... these logos are pushed and perpetuated by people who don't really understand how the web works because it gives other people who don't understand how the web works warm fuzzies. I am always annoyed when I see logos like that and regret that it seems to be a cost of doing business for many types of firms on the web.

If I want to be confident about a site, I need to see a certificate from a well-known certificate authority and I should be able to look up the corporate information on the company named in the certificate easily. Logos are fluff. Certificates mean something.
posted by tarheelcoxn at 8:10 PM on October 17

Ah. It has just been pointed out to me that what you want is to provide the members/partners/whatever a custom link for what goes on their site (something like http://YOURSITE.example.com/badge.php?member=acme) such that when a user clicks on the link and lands on your site, they get an "acme is a member in good standing" message. Is that right?
posted by tarheelcoxn at 8:23 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

yes, tarheelcoxn.

exactly.

here is a random page (no affiliation) on Google that has a BB seal that is hyper-linked to a page on the BBB that is about his good standing:

random link to an attorney page with BBB seal</a
posted by Izzmeister at 5:48 AM on October 18

It sounds like you now have what you need to post a job to a site like elance. What do you lack? Could you restate what your confusion is if you're still confused? If your question is now, "How do I judge web-based software quality?" then there are two reasonable answers we could give you: educate yourself to the point that you could do it yourself, or hire a firm that has a reputation for delivering quality results instead of turning to elance. We could try to tell you what to look for, but it wouldn't prevent you from being taken for a ride if you don't really understand why we've told you to look for those things.
posted by tarheelcoxn at 10:57 AM on October 18

So, does that mean that I am posting a "looking for programmer to post a cgi backend to an image to verify membership in good standing with an organization"?
posted by Izzmeister at 1:21 PM on October 18

I would drop "cgi" from the description. Better sentence would probably be: "Looking for a programmer to provide code that verifies membership in good standing with an organization when user clicks a badge on the member's site."
posted by tarheelcoxn at 1:45 AM on October 20