Until recently you had little control on how many people accessed and viewed the content of your norbt. Based on user feedback, we have added functionality to let users know how many times their norbt had been viewed and who by. But we didn’t stop there! We also added functionality which allows users to limit the number of times that a specific norbt can be viewed.
In this post we’ll explain how you can control access to your norbt by limiting the number of times that norbt.com will serve your norbt‘s encrypted content before the content is blocked to new views.
In our previous post we explained how you can track visits on your norbts . It may be useful to read it to understand better how blocking works.
Why would I block norbts?
There are multiple reason why you may want to block a norbt but some examples that come to mind are the following:
One to one private email
You want to send an email that should only be read once by the final recipient. By setting the number of visits to 1 you are telling norbt.com that the encrypted data should only be served once. Only the first person that access your norbt and answers it correctly gets access to the norbt’s encrypted content.
Challenge with a reward for the first X people to view
If you are doing a challenge where you give a reward to the first X people who answer your question correctly, you could control that by limiting the number of views of the encrypted content to X.
My own private norbts
If you have private norbts with information that only you want to access, you can block them when you are not using them to stop people from trying to guess your answer.
Outdated norbts
If you have norbts that you are not using right now, but may use in the future, you may choose to block it now and un-block it in the future when you need it. If you delete a norbt you will be losing the ID associated to it, so you may consider blocking it instead to keep the ID.
How to block your norbts
To limit the number of times your norbt can be opened you have to go to the edit/manage page for your norbt. To do that click on the manage norbt in your norbt‘s view page. You must be logged in as the owner of the norbt to view the manage button.
Once you are on the manage page for your norbt, select the view control tab. There you have two options: block the norbt right now using the checkbox or select the number of times that your norbt can be opened before it blocks.
If you select to enter a number in max. views. The norbt encrypted content will not be served by the server once the max views number has been exceed. If the norbt in question has already been served that number of times or more, it will be blocked automatically – the result will be the same as if you had chosen to mark block access.
Note that when you limit the number of times that encrypted content will be served, your requests as a owner of the norbt do not count towards blocking.
Find your blocked norbts
Finding out which of norbt‘s are blocked is easy. In your norbt‘s page, those norbts which are blocked appear with red stripes on top of their id.
You can click on any id to go it’s specific view page, and from there to the id management page and change the view control fields if you want to un-block it.
How your blocked norbts are seen
When a norbt is blocked the norbt’s visitor gets a message (see the image below). The user sees the title and the question of your norbt. The user doesn’t get the option to answer the question and view the content.
Some security details
The block feature is controlled by our server, even if you bypass the ui (user interface) and send the right answer to get the encrypted content, our servers will check if the norbt is blocked and if you are the owner of the norbt to know if it should serve the norbt‘s encrypted content.
For more details about security see our security page.
We hope you find this functionality useful. We’ll keep on working to improve your experience at norbt.com. Thanks for your support.
