Stacks4Stacks

This started as a stack purely for getting age verification, for visitors coming to a microbrewery website. However one of our regular customers was in need of a stack that could get users to watch an important instructional video, before allowing them to continue onwards to a software downloads website. This stack already had the basis to do 95% of what he wanted, and with a few further additions, this stack grew into one that can confidently handle almost any sort of basic visitor verification.

VerifiyStack can be used in conjunction with other stacks like CookieManager or MiniCookie, if you need to conditionally keep restricted content entirely removed from webpages, until after the verification test has been passed. So VerifiyStack goes a long way towards compliance of age restricted content.

Nine different verification methods are supported by VerifiyStack:

1. Soft Verification: Simply asks for the visitor to read something on screen and click on a button.
2. Audio Listening: The visitor has to listen to a short audio file, before they can continue.
3. Video Watching: The visitor has to watch a short video clip or advert, before they can continue.
4. Checkbox Verification: Requires that the visitor checks on a checkbox, for confirmation.
5. Low Security Password: A bare-basic password system (mostly just for fun) that validates via Javascript.
6. Full Date Inputs: The visitor has to verify their birth day, month and year using number input boxes.
7. Year Only Input: The visitor has to type their birth year within a number input box.
8. Full Date Select Menus: Select menus are presented for the day, month and year, the visitor has to choose from.
9. Year Only Select Menu: Provides a single select menu for the visitor to select their birth year from.

The entire VerifiyStack stack is translatable into any language. The age threshold (18 by default) can be raised or lowered to suit individual requirements for date verification types.

Within the VerifiyStack settings, the window shade, buttons, input boxes and modal popup are all fully customisable to match an existing website. This ensures that VerifiyStack looks like an expertly-coded solution for your website; rather than something that gives an impression of being crudely added as an afterthought!

We recognise that quite a lot of professional RapidWeaver users running businesses like breweries, pharmaceuticals, gaming and gambling shops are affiliated with various support, abuse and addiction help services. So we provide optional space within the VerifiyStack stack, where you can display associated buttons or links to these outside services, like drinkaware.co.uk, begambleaware.org, takefive-stopfraud.org.uk, and whenthefunstops.co.uk etc.

Not only for age verification!

It needs to be emphasised that this stack is not just for age verification. The soft, audio, video and checkbox verification types make this stack perfect for getting users to see or agree to something, before viewing a webpage or being redirected somewhere else (like to a download link). The normal modal title text and message text can be left empty. You can instead use the Additional Content Above or Additional Content Below settings to place extra stacks within your modal window, like free UsefulStacks, to create small boxes of scrolling content.

Example

You probably saw an example of VerifiyStack as you arrived on this webpage. To test it again, click the button below to clear the tracking cookie and reload the webpage.
 
 

 
 
We are mostly using the default settings for this example. VerifiyStack has lots of settings and may look complicated at first glance, but it is in-fact remarkably simple and flexible to use. The wide choice of settings are there to aid users who want to heavily customise the appearance of the popup modal.

There is also a sample RapidWeaver project file to download from the top of this page. This provides a real working example of each configuration possible. It works with both the free demo version of VerifyStack and the paid version to buy here.

Setup

Please follow these instructions for getting a VerifySack configured within your RapidWeaver project:

1. Once installed into Stacks and RapidWeaver, open your Stacks library and drag-and-drop a copy of the VerifyStack stack into your page.
2. In the stack settings (shown in Stacks edit mode) choose the type of verification to use. Date verification is the default setting, but other verification types exist too.
3. Change any of the desired style and colour settings, to match your website. Font faces are already inherited from your theme, for greater design consistency.
4. Preview your webpage to test the verification. Export or publish when done.

To include VerifyStack on every page of your website (recommended) configure it as a partial. If you are already including stacks on every page (like cookie popups or footers) then you can include VerifiyStack with these too.

Making VerifyStack work with CookieManager or MiniCookie

So the basic concept to understand is that when the verification test is 'passed', a new cookie is set on the visitors computer called passed_verification. This gives us a convenient flag to identify visitors who have gone through our verification test and those who haven't.

Working on the assumption we had some content we only want shown to verified visitors, we can place one or more CookieManager or MiniCookie stacks in the webpage. If either of these stacks is set to Conditional Display, then we have placeholders to put content. We could display content to website users who are not verified yet, and display alternative content to those website users who have passed our verification test.

The key benefit of using CookieManager or MiniCookie stacks for conditional display of content is that it's all done server side with PHP. There is never a danger that the restricted content can still download or be seen in the page background by someone. The restricted content only ever comes into the page, when the verification test has passed.