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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
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Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
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If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
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Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
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Make a trial version of application?

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    #1

    Make a trial version of application?

    How can I make a trial version of my application that would limit the user to to a certain numbers of uses. I've done the time thing before and people always got around it by changing the time on the computer. I want to limit the user to maby 20 uses and then have the program stop functioning after that point. We need some kind of security on our apps that we develop. I like the way Alaha5 ver 5 works.
    Tags: None
    #2
    RE: Make a trial version of application?

    Fred

    One method that works, but is not foolproof, is to save a value to a table or external text file every time the user opens the program. Then have the program check the stored value and increment it each time. When it reaches the limit, lock the program.

    Unfortunately, this might be easy to defeat. If the value is saved to a table, all the user has to do is reload the program to defeat that. If the value is saved to a file, the user could change or delete the file. One way to reduce the chance of this is to save the value in a file in the a5 program directory with a .dll extension and some official sounding name like "a5_reg.dll" Most users won't have the guts to delete or open such a file.

    There are other more complex methods. Another is to use the Windows registry and save some encrypted value to a registry key. The installation loads a seed value and each opening changes the value and saves some obscure encrypted value. Again, a dedicated user can go into the registry and edit the key, if they can identify it.

    The problem is that any method can be beaten. Probably the best method is a method that requires a complete reload to defeat. At least the user won't be able to save any useful data since the reload should wipe out existing data.

    Jerry

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      #3
      RE: Make a trial version of application?

      Fred,

      Another idea is to limit the number of records that a table might hold. Your startup routines could check the number of records and force program end if they're trying to get around you. Your add new record routines inside the application could check to see whether the next record would violate the limit, and terminate the enter. -- tom

      Comment

        #4
        RE: Make a trial version of application?

        How about running a zap operation when the predetermined value in Tom's
        approach is reached. It should be stated upfront that the zap will
        occur at the predetermined number of usages. It can zap multiple
        tables.
        efs

        Comment

          #5
          RE: Make a trial version of application?

          I figured a way to limit the number of records. I had a password protected script that limited the number of jobs, employees, and customers. I also had a registration function that encrypted the company name. Change the name and you needed a new key. Use "demo" as the key and you could have 3 customers, jobs and employees.

          Never distributed anything, though.

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