Opening up via self-registration, paid plans

[kdarras]

As the community will grow, it will not be possible for admins to individually create or even authorize new users to join the website as well as managing all projects and data.

This is a strategic discussion related to the funding of the website and the orientation it will take relative to different user groups (researchers, citizen scientists, practitioners, NGOs and government).

If the website financed itself, we should offer commercial usage plans. If the website was publicly funded (in the long term), we could offer free self-registration features.

Commercial plans (old idea):
add a "sign up" link in the top menu to open a page with a choice of 3 memberships:

500 MB storage, one project for X EUR/year.

5 GB storage, five projects for 5 reference recordings or soundscape collection according to global acoustic diversity paper (upgrade manual on request) or 5*X EUR/year.

50 GB storage, 10 projects for completion of GitHub project (upgrade manual on request) or 10*X EUR/year.

Larger projects: contact us for negotiation.

Implement this page as soon as possible, and before the registration works, insert "coming soon" announcement.

Free self-registration:
Give the users 2 choices for registration:
manual: let users fill in this form:

name
email
password
automatic: sign up with:

Google
ORCID
in both cases, the user must tell us whether their category (researcher/practitioner/amateur)

Check that users are no bots.