I have email notifications on my site but I want to add SMS notifications also. I am lost how to do this. Is it purely coding or do i need to engage in partnerships with phone providers world over or buy a service or how does it work. And for the coding are there frameworks i can use or have to do it from ground up? My social network is in php and mysql. Do i need anything from the database for this, like to store the messages or is that all on the ISP's end?
You need either a service for that, or to set up your own infrastructure (GSM modem, etc.). Best go with an SMS Aggregator, such as Clickatel. The technical term for this kind of service is "SMS Gateway".
Whichever gateway you choose, you need to find out what their API is and use it to send SMS.
I recommend Twilio. I used them to send SMS and synthesized voice notifications for an agricultural telemetry monitoring application I developed, and in my experience they have a fantastic service at a very reasonable price. (If I sound like a shill, I'm not -- just a happy customer.)
As for integration, they have a REST-based API that's easily used from PHP. I think they even have a PHP library, although I haven't used it myself.
You need to sign up to a SMS gateway. There are very many SMS gateway providers out there. You need to write code to send the SMS, quite similar to the code you write for sending e-mails. Fortunately you can re-use code written by others for this.
I have good experience using Clickatell as SMS gateway and they have code for sending sms ready for several languages including php.
You do not need to store anything in your database, fire and forget.
Good luck :)
Many telephone companies also operate free email-to-SMS gateways; for example, T-Mobile has it setup where you can send to phonenumber#tmomail.net to send an SMS/MMS message. Of course, it is less efficient and also requires that you know about all the gateways out there (and keep them up-to-date as possible, of course). However, it's an option if you have only a small number of users, and/or a large number of users that are on a small number of separate networks.
You have two main options when it comes to adding SMS functionality t your website or blog. 1. Cloud based SMS gateways 2. Software based SMS gateways
Informs of initial setup Costs and time required to set up the service, cloud based solutions are preferable as their popularity means there are many who use the service and provide hell on their forums - normally only a little knowledge of html you could be up and runing within a few hours
The following website has some useful info on the subject and also provides a free international SMS widget for webmasters to add SMS to their websites or blogs
http://xboxpcpro.co.uk/how-to-add-sms-to-website/
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I faced with a such question for which can not find an answer in google. For example, I have a company which provides some services for customers. And for new users I have a promo/discounts. As we know there are a lot of websites which provide fake number for receiving sms for registration. I need a useful solution to prevent registration with such numbers. I want to check if this number is real or not and allow registration only if real. What is your suggestion/solution ? What would you do or maybe already did something for escaping a such problems.
Note: Maybe Some tags are not relevant to this issue, so please inform me and I will remove this tag. Or vice verse, if you have any suggestions related tags please let me know I will add this tag.
Thank you in advance.
Usually what you do is you take the number/email and you send it to a service most likely through an API. There is rarely any inhouse software that does this functionality!
Here are a few services, I have used & worked with etumos before, not bad but it comes with a price!
https://etumos.com/products/etumos-verify/
https://numverify.com/documentation
For numverify, it is free to an extent. Try it out & see if it works with your solution.
It supports Carrier Detection
While phone numbers help businesses identify and legitimize customers, some numbers are very easy to retrieve from certain carriers. For exmaple, anyone can quickly register multiple phone numbers from a free online provider, making it easy to create fake profiles.
To address this risk, the numverify API will return a separate carrier object containing the name of the carrier the requested phone number is registered with. This way businesses can require additional identity authentication for carriers associated with higher fraud instances.
Send an SMS to the number, ask a question that a human can answer better than a bot and request a response.
For a hobby project of me i'm looking to implement a group voice chat feature. Pretty straight forward: I'm running a server to which multiple clients (mobile) can connect to. Some Clients are in the same "group" and I want them to have an audio chat feature.
I already set up a UDP server client with C# to which clients can connect to. I have successfully implemented audio distribution between clients over the server and the rudimentary features are working pretty well.
I am not sure if i'm going in the right direction with this approach though.
I'm stuck with the implementation of mixing the different voices for example (two people talking simultaneously and another is listening to both). I don't really know how I can mix both voices together and generate different outputs for different clients - above mentioned example: The two people talking should only receive the input of the other person while the one not talking should receive a mix of the other two talking.
What is the best server sided structure for this? Should i maybe go in a completely different direction and work with SIP? I'm having a hard time finding suitable resources for this problem online and i'm really stuck.
Thanks for your help!
Let me suggest using standards in your application. If (as I strongly recommend) your application is a web application, WebRTC make your job dramatically easier. Please see in WebRTC samples some ideas that I'm sure will inspire you, including multiple peer connections
If you are only interested in group calls, you could install a PBX server as asterisk that has a powerfull set of conference capabilities. You could use a SIP library on top of WebRTC in clients (e.g. sip.js, sipml5) to connect via SIP to asterisk and obtain conference services. This could sound daunting but the code for calling a conference room can be reduced to very few lines and asterisk can be easily installed in a linux box in a real machine, or in a virtual one or in a docker container.
If you prefer fat clients, I suggest using a SIP library as PJSIP (that incidentally is the base of the new SIP stack for asterisk). Proprietary solutions ride against the future while standard ones are pushed by it.
I'm considering using segment.io for several of my client-side 3rd party API needs, but I'm a little concerned about ad-blockers.
My app has no ads, but I do a lot of event-tracking for product analytics, as well as error tracking.
Segment.io offers a nice all-in-one solution, but if it's blocked, and all my eggs are in that basket, then, well, I won't have any eggs left, or however that idiom ends.
So my question is: is there a way to integrate multi-purpose event tracking (segment.io, keen.io, etc.) that isn't as susceptible to ad-blocking?
My app is mostly serverless, using a Firebase+AWS Lambda setup, so I've tried to think of some kind of back-end solution, but no big ideas so far.
ETA: I'm not looking to track adblocking users or violate anyone's trust. my question is about event-tracking unrelated to a user's identity, and whether or not that's possible in an all-in-one event tracking library that might be ad-blocked.
First, I'd typically consider such blocking to be "privacy" blocking instead of ads. So instead of Adblock it's more likely to be Ghostery or uBlock Origin.
Although most website uses of analytics are benign (improving conversion rates, catching browser exceptions, etc), the concern many have is that it allows the third party analytics sites (including segment, etc) to track users across multiple websites. Now most of these analytics sites are also not interested in that, but better safe than sorry?
The ethics of wanting to have analytics about all your webapp use are far more nuanced than "privacy good, tracking bad" and I don't think this is the forum for it, so I'll provide you a technical answer. Just note that your disclaimer about not wanting to "track adblocking users" is not really valid. If your aim is to gather analytics about them, that's still essentially tracking. Otherwise just use a hosted solution and realise that maybe 10-20% of users don't provide you with analytics.
The bad news: basically every "hosted" analytics solution is or will be in the block lists. Not only are their API hosts directly blocked, but there are also blocks in placed based on the name of JS files you may try to include.
The good news: you can work around it if you relay events through your own API, and AWS API Gateway which you may already be using is perfect for this.
There are multiple steps to this.
Step 1: The analytics provider need to provide the option of a fully bundled/built JS file. If they require you to pull the script dynamically from their own servers then it will be blocked there before it even downloads.
Step 2: Rename the bundled script so that it doesn't trigger any filename-based blocks, e.g. rename from mixpanel.umd.js to mp.js, and add it to your server.
Step 3: Create an API gateway to relay events back to the "correct" API (e.g. to api.analyticshost.com). You can actually do this with AWS API gateway only (no lambda required) if you pass through the right headers and URL params.
Step 4: Initialise the library to use your API host rather than the default one.
The result of this is (a) the browser no longer needs to dynamically pull the analytics from the analytics provider's CDN, and instead gets it from your server, and (b) the browser sends it to your API and then relayed through to the analytics provider's.
When gathering analytics segment also provides server side tracking libraries. This can be quite useful when you want to gather metrics for certain types of events that might be blocked by users on the client. At it's simplest, Segment has an HTTP Source but there are a number of popular languages supported as well.
https://segment.com/docs/connections/sources/catalog/#server
The classic example is the order complete event, this would typically happen in your server once that transaction has been committed to a database. Regardless of browser configuration, you could send this event from the server and track.
Be sure you respect the users consent management settings here though.
A lot of valid points are already mentioned in the accepted answer, I would mention a few technical considerations to minimize ad blockers impact on tracking tools (Segment, Google Tag Manager, etc):
Develop for server-side tracking. Whatever is on server cannot be blocked by ad blockers. However, this is usually tricky and very custom, Segment gives some examples on it as well.
Use managed client-side proxy solutions like DataUnlocker. This is great and does not require many code changes.
Use self-hosted open-source solutions for proxying Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager like this or this. I believe these solutions can be extended to support Segment as well.
I have an idea for a mobile service based project. I have read some stuff online, including the following tutorial: SMS Tutorial and find it to be pretty helpful but I have some basic questions so please bear with me.
I run a small (as in me and a friend) company and want to setup a situation where people can text a number and receive information back, or setup on my website that they receive text messages letting them know its time to do something, or "tech support" can text them if they wish, etc.
So from what I've gathered, I can use Kannel as my "SMS gateway" interacting with a GSM Modem that I can purchase. For this modem I can buy a texting plan SIM. I can then setup Kannel to use my GSM modem as a virtual smsc. So, users can text that SIMs phone number, which will go to the modem and be interpreted by Kannel. My application will only have to interact with Kannel. And in the future, if I decide I need more texting throuput and upgrade to a real SMSC my application does not need to change.
Is there anything I'm missing/misunderstanding?
Thanks!
Using Kannel as a SMS gateway is a good option for a small company. It does come with a lot of headaches as you have to build, configure, maintain, etc.. all of the services you need, This is what everyone is referring to as "A lot of work".
What you are looking to do is use the GSM modem as a Long Code (verses short Code) for text messaging.
I think this is an expectable solution for something small and where service, latency and availability might not be as important if it's for a local region. But if this is something that needs to be reliable I would think about getting a short code (or sharing a short code) or just a SMS Messaging service with No Long/Short Code (See Twilio Below).
Also if you're trying to rollout your own service there are some things to consider with the SMSC's. If your Kannel/GSM Modem doesn't support the Carrier, you would have to reach out to that Carrier and connect to thier SMSC. This is a hefty price to connect to a Carrier. This is way Aggregators are appealing as they Have all the Carrier connections and pay those fees.
As you transitioning from Kannel to a Gateway Service Provider, that's another headache as you would need to start from scratch and use whatever the service provider API is and replace the Kannel/GSM altogether. Your workflow might be the same but how you send and receive messages with differ greatly. Most (if not all) Aggregators will offer there own version of a SDK/API/Service that you would need to comply with to use their service.
If it's in the US there are some other options you might consider:
Twilio, this is the simplest solution I've seem for smaller companies looking for SMS functionality. Now they are currently offering SMS Short Codes by trial but if you need a short code I would go with a true messaging aggregator.
Zeep Mobile Offers a free SMS service with a Short Code, but they do send Ads with all your SMS Messages. This is a great way to subsidize costs if the Ads don't bother you. Not sure if you can pick the types of ads you want but it's another option for a service.
Clickatell offers a service where you can Share a Short Code and use Keywords to filter your SMS traffic to your account. This is another way to cut some costs if you're funds and traffic (how much SMS you send and receive) are limited
OpenMarket offers a full service SMS/MMS global platform, this is who you want if you doing Mass amounts of trafic and/or need to reach globally.
Note: These are just a few services as there are many, many more
There are also some caveats with having a Short Code as you will need to register a new Short Code if the country you are services needs it's own Short Code. Example: you can use your US Short Code to service Canada, You would also need a Canadian Short Code as well. This can get costly if your only doing small amounts of traffic.
I think you have got basic considerations. John is right, and using a sms gateway is better idea, you will get better reliability and thoughput. And you could get slow prices.
I want to transfer data between a smart phone app and a website. What are the conventional and not-so-conventional ways of doing it?
Here's what I have thought of so far:
Simple HTTP GET/POST with data being represented as JSON array string, variations of this being encrypted/compressed string as parameter.
Webservice calls ( I am not sure if this is even possible, just a guess)
Two step communication : Smartphone to/fro Desktop App to/fro Website) (Cumbersome to develop/use)
Also, what do I need to consider to avoid spamming/snooping?
If your goals is convince, security and ease of development. I'd have the client (phone) make requests to the server over HTTPS using POST. The data sent should be what ever library is available for your target system. Good choices are URL Encoded parameters, XML and JSON. Avoid Binary protocols.
The downside of this approach is using network connectivity from a device to the web service may not be available or expensive, with the plan the user has. (this is becoming less so with the current wave of smart phones (iPhone/gPhone/Blackberry etc))
This is also a polling interface, so pushing data from the server to the handset is tricky and dependent on the User initiating some action.
Depending on the phone platform, you could also use SMS, for bi-directional communication. The limitation here is privacy, bandwidth and cost. SMS's are more expensive to send the ip data depending on user plan. (and sometimes to receive) The bi-directional trick is performed by registering a SMS hook in the phone application. Thus the application can be automatically started and notified when a certain SMS is received.
Please post additional information, like target platforms and I can discuss further options.
I think the first two are pretty much the same thing. What you want to do is an HTTP Post if you are sending a lot of data, or a GET with a query string if theres a smaller amount of data. It's all going to be unencrypted transmission, so keep that in mind when using HTTP.
If you're using the .NET Compact Framework and developing for Windows Mobile, the easiest approach is to use web services. However, .NET web services serialize everything as verbose XML, which makes the size of the data sent back and forth larger than it has to be. Using JSON is a good way of cutting down on the size of your data, even when using .NET web services (the trick is to send an entire JSON document as a single parameter). Minimizing the size of your transferred data is especially important for Smartphone applications, since your data transfer will probably be done over a cellular network.