Hi
Sounds quite interesting, although I’m using the Hotspot / Captive Portal of OPNsense.
However a few but’s or gotcha’s: Almost every page of the documentation focuses or contains the word Ad - it seems the emphasis is on generating leads (A Terminology implying spam or unsolicited mails).
The next BIG But is a server out of house…
I don’t quite like the idea of having a server in house that can do almost anything, then having to go to an outside hosted server for permissions. I only see the reason as collecting more spamming data.
Have any dude log in twice - as excuse give html limitations or caching - and presto, you’ve got your double opt-in.
I hate spamming lingo like this…
There are other hotspot GUIs that don’t focus on marketing (Online that is known usually as spam…).
I see a hotspot with captive portal - say for schools or elsewhere in education, or a hospital or other institution like a hotel - as a good method for controlling misuse and bandwidth. But collecting data and reselling clients data is a No-Go for me!
In a Hotel, for example, we offer free WLan for guests. Clients LapTops with trojans led to the Internet Service be denied by our provider, for spamming reasons. With the captive portal, and traffic shaping, everything works quite well. All clients can send mail. If they want to send 2-3 mails, also no problem. If they want to send 1-2 thousand mails, they will be delayed by traffic shaping. They would need to stay a couple of Months to send that much… ;-). Any trojan will be “held up”.
Since two years working for almost all guests - no further problems…
My 2 cents, even if it may be harsch. But still within Open Source and against overly commercial pushes…
Andy
Andy