Aweber and Vbulletin Integration Issues
brandondrury
Offering Separate Forum and Newsletter Signups Is Cheap
First of all, I hate the notion of separating a newsletter from a site. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel that a newsletter is an extension of the site. I feel that there isn’t much point to being a member of a site if you are not an active member. It seems that every active member would want to be use the services and forums we provide AND receive email newsletters. I want the updates!!!
So, when a person says “Hey, I want to join your site”, to me that is the perfect time to ask them if they want to receive the newsletter. This could be through a Wordpress blog or a vBulletin forum or whatever. If not, no problem. However, it seems like a waste not to ask. On the other side of the coin, how many people really want to join a forum or blog and then turn around and join a newsletter. Granted, it’s not that much work and it really isn’t that confusing. However, it’s clearly a case where we, as webmasters, could be doing a little bit better.
Most of us consider our forum members and blog members to be “site members”. However, if these site members do not go the extra mile to also sign up for the newsletter, they will be left in the dark. The problem is compounded by sites that offer both a forum, a blog, and maybe even some other feature. Site integration becomes a nitemare! We could assume that forum members are completely aware of what is going on with your site, but I’ve not found this to be the case. I’ve noticed that active forum members are often clueless about site updates if there is no newsletter. A newsletter will allow the webmaster to really emphasize the big points. A forum is not so great at this. So why do we treat our Newsletter scripts our Forum scripts, and our blog scripts as unique entities when, in my opinion, they are extensions of each other.
How I Would Prefer To Integrate Vbulletin and Aweber
For the big launch of textlinkcenter.com, we were thinking that we would add a custom field into our vBulletin that asks “Do you want to receive the newsletter?”. If a person selected yes, we were going to send their name, email, etc to Aweber automatically in order to keep the registration clean and user friendly. From there, both vBulletin and Aweber would require the user to activate their accounts via emails.
Aweber tells us that they do not allow custom forms to send data to Aweber servers. They say that this is why they can ensure a high deliverability rate. Hmmm. So what is so “secure” about their form? They say that it allows them to track where the user is coming from and using a third party form will not allow them to achieve the same levels of security.
For the moment, I’ll appease them. I’ll give Aweber the benefit of the doubt and assume they are right.
However, if you look on the Aweber knowledge base portion of the site, they have no problems at all with you accepting business cards from people who wanted to be on your mailing list from a convention or lunch. In other words, you (the webmaster building the list) can import the data you received at your convention into a spreadsheet and import that into Aweber.
So how does Aweber ensure deliverability of emails when a person could always just import data using Excel or equivalent? Either there extra security placed on web forms is unnecessary or they are bypassing necessary security when users import data from spreadsheets.
Obviously, Aweber uses the double opt-in method where everyone on the list has to manually click on a link in their email to confirm their membership to the mailing list anyway. So why is there extra security when using the online form? So far, I see no reason for this even after repeated dealings with Weber’s support (which has been VERY fast, by the way).
Vbulletin and Aweber Integration Solutions
Going back to my Vbulletin / Aweber integration utopia, I’d prefer to have just one form where a member joins the site. There is no need for redundant forms of the same data. NONE! However, Aweber insists on using their forms for the newsletter. Okay. That’s the rules. I’ll take that as a challenge. Can I still make it work? We are going to find out. My next plan is to attempt to use Aweber as the entirety of my sites registration and pass these variables onto a severely modified vBulletin registration page. My gut says that vBulletin will also have it’s share of security, too. My gut says that the vBulletin security may actually be of more understandable use.
So, I’ll let everyone know how my experiment goes down. While I’ve done my share of php programming this year, I can’t say that I’m excited into tearing open vBulletin.
Brandon
