Safari Reader sharing

Hey guys,

Again, just want to say that I appreciate all your responses everytime. I think it’s great that you have people we can reach out to regarding s2member. Thank again.

OK, now I don’t know if you’ll be able to answer this because it doesn’t necessarily involve the plugin (but it kind of does), it involves securing the protected content. If you are familiar with Safari at all, you may know that the browser has newer features like Reader, which allows you view the main article of the page in a clean, readable format. It also let’s you share it via email. I do think it’s great that people can have the option to read the stories this way, but since this is a paid site, the ability to email the protected content to someone else can hurt our subscriptions. In fact, we get emails all the time from folks writing in to tell us they loved a certain article, yet they are not a subscriber, so we definitely have people sharing the protected content with others. Has this ever come up to you guys before, is there anyway you know to disable that option?

Secondly, Safari also has a command in the file dropdown that lets you “Mail Contents of this Page”. When you do this it transfers you to your mail application (like Apple’s Mail) and inserts a full html copy of the page into the email. Like I said above, I think this is just another way that people can spread around our paid content so others can get it for free.

If there are any pointers or tips you all have for me, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking to time to look into it.

regards!

Thank you for reporting this important issue.

I’m very sorry for the delay in response.

Unfortunately this is a concern in all browsers now, as with any browser you can effectively Save any page, and there’s no way to stop that from happening. I will have our development team check to see if there is a header we can pass to stop Safari from allowing Users to do this.

Thank you Bruce. It would really mean alot to me if anyone on your development team had any ideas on how we could keep sharing to a minimum. I have a temp solution for Safari Reader, but am very stumped on the “Mail contents of this Page” tool.

I know that some of my subscribers are sharing this way, and again I do know that it will be impossible to completely lock everything down these days. People will sharing it however they can….but I would just like to see if it’s possible.

Thanks!

Thanks for your thoughts.

I’ve taken a look into this and there is no Safari API to stop this from happening AFAIK. In reality, if you’re giving Users access to protected content there is nothing you can do to stop them from sharing this information. Even if you converted your content into downloadable PDF files, the ability to share that file is at the discretion of the User that downloaded the file.

s2Member can protect access to the content directly, but the only thing that can keep your Users from sharing the information once they have it is legal stuff (Terms of Service, Copyrights, etc.). We run into this issue even here on s2Member.com, as any User that downloads s2Member Pro has the ability to share the module with anyone. We manage this by protecting the upgrade process, and with our policies.

We’ll keep an eye out for the ability to keep this from happening but at the current time we can’t provide a workaround for this.