Library/Institute Access to Website

The site I’m using s2member on has a number of historical databases which are accessible by paid members of the site. We have interest from libraries and other institutions in offering access to our databases through computers on their premises.

What’s the best way to set up an account for a specific institution that can be accessed by let’s say 5 computers at once, and only from specific computers on the institution’s premises? Ideally it would be one account for everything, but I would create 5 (for example) if necessary. The main problem is how to prevent the institution’s accounts from being used outside their premises. Theoretically we could restrict it to an IP range I guess, but are there other options? Is this something s2member can do, or do I need other software?

Thanks.

Thanks for your inquiry. ~ We appreciate your patience :-)

s2Member’s Unique IP Restrictions will allow you to say, “I’ll only allow up to 5 unique IPs for each Username that I create”. That’s what this section of your Dashboard is for, with s2Member installed. See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Restriction Options -› Unique IP Access Restrictions

However, this is NOT going to lock your entire site down to only 5 IPs, or anything like that. It’s based on per-account access. So each account can be accessed by up to 5 different IPs, every 30 day period; for example.

If you need to restrict access, where only a specific IP address, or a block of IPs is allowed, that’s something you would need to handle with an additional plugin, or perhaps write up something custom and build it as a quick MU plugin. I hope that helps to clarify this better.

Please see: http://codex.wordpress.org/Must_Use_Plugins

Thank you for your response. I use the IP restriction feature already, but as you see it’s a slightly different problem. I want to insure that the institution accounts always work from within their premises, but never work outside them. I already have a lot of plugins in my system and figured to check with you first in case s2member could do something like this. Thanks for your help.