Acknowledgements Documentation

Note: For the acknowledgement package to work well, you have to disable persistent logins and patch /packages/acs-authentication/tcl/authentication-procs.tcl so that no login cookie is issued if there are terms of use that have not been accepted. The patch can be found in the root dir of this package.

This packages provides a set of features for dealing with terms of use and acknowledgements for site users, including:

• create "global" terms of use that have to be signed by all users vs. non-global terms, where acceptance can be checked via tcl-api. a small addition to the authorization procedure is necessary to lock users out that did not accept terms of use. therefor persistent logins should be disabled. otherwise already logged in users can not so easily be forced to accept terms of use, afaik.
• three modes can be used to have users accept terms of use: mark a checkbox, enter a phrase, enter their password when a user wants to login that has not accepted all necessary terms of use, the password variant is always used. this is because we do not want to issue a login cookie prior to the acceptance of all necessary terms of use, but we must make sure that the "right" user accepts the term of use.
• terms of use can have a due-date so that existing users have time to accept the terms, before accounts are locked
• terms of use can be assigned to a certain group
• german/english UI

The package is automounted at /acknowledgement. The user and admin UI can be found there. If you want to check acceptance of a term of use via the tcl api, create a new non-global term of use and insert the following into your tcl page: acknowledgement::require_response $shortname_of_term. The user is then automatically transferred to a page where he has to accept the term of use. Access to your tcl page is not granted, if the term of use is not accepted.