I'm writing some scripts that are free, but only to members within my teaching program. What I want to do is check what sites have installed the script.
I was thinking of obfuscating some PHP that posts back to my server when installed so I can see the domain it's used on. Obviously the user could remove this, but if I was to put a few application variables in with the code it might stop them removing because doing so would break the script.
Any comments on this approach?
if you really want to be sure, use something like Zend Guard (aka Zend Encoder) to encode the php file.
If you want some of it to be user-editable, just encode the core functions (along with your security check) in a separate file and then leave the higher level code open for them to tinker with/modify as required.