rails beta request signup with social media sharing reward

Question

I would like to build a simple beta request signup page where the user is rewarded with an earlier reward when he is sharing the link to the application as much as possible.

A solution like this is seeable on trenvy.com

• User enters email
• User gets unique link with his unique code
• User shares this link on every signup its a +1 count on him
• An admin method throws out the users emails which have shared the link and brought the most people in. I want to use this email list to use in CampaignMonitor.

Anyone knows what could be a good way to achieve this? Or someone wrote such a thing or knows a git repo that has this feature implemented as is to take a look at and learn? I have already coded a unique code generator for the app that makes unique codes of 10 chars. Now only this social media sharing is a bit unclear to me on how to approach this in rails, any ideas on that? thx!

Answer 1

Something like this can be achieved pretty easily in any framework, so I think I'll provide a general answer first, and if any specific gems occur to me, I'll mention them:

1) The unique code part is easy, it's just a parameter in a controller that checks the validity of the code — this would be a unique code that's added to the user model for ease of verification and created when the user first enters his email address.

2) Every time the link is visited, it's parsed by the controller and saves an event (don't just increment a field if you want maximum data out of the interaction, you could save IP for country of origin, time of the page hit, etc), just count the click events for that user for his +1s

3) Just write a quick admin site (i used twitter bootstrap for this recently) that lets you see the user's who've interacted with the system and sort by shares, and you can use the createsend gem to add them to whatever list you like.

There are no specific gems I can think of that'll speed this process up, Devise is overkill, you don't really need an activity monitor gem since you're not storing much info, definitely twitter_bootstrap for speeding up building the admin interface. Heroku lets you add an Sendgrid as a plugin, so you're covered there for mail sending.

Am i missing anything in your requirements? Seriously though this should be a 2-4 day dev effort, nothing fancy here.