Ares Standard: Authentication Process & Customizing Settings

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By default, all Ares installations are set up with Standard Ares authentication. This type of authentication allows anyone with access to the registration pages to register him or herself, choose a username and password, and then use that username and password to login to the Ares web later. 

Registering

All new users have access to the Student Tools menu, but, depending upon your clearance and instructor privilege settings, new Faculty users may need to be manually cleared in the staff interface before they can access the Instructor Tools menu and create courses. Staff can review those users, disavow them if they are not allowed to use the system or clear them as valid users with Instructor Privileges. Staff can clear customers at any point in the process. Standard authentication does not verify user information against any external system upon registration or login. Once a customer registers with Ares he or she is allowed to login to the web interface until staff either blocks the user or disavows the user from the system.

Setup

For Standard Ares authentication, the AuthenticationMethod key should be set to Ares. This key is located in the User Authentication section of the customization manager. This type of authentication allows users to reset their password via the Ares web interface by providing their usernames and receiving an email with a link to provide a new password.

Disabling User Registration for Standard Ares Authentication

As standard Ares authentication does not verify user information against any external system upon registration or login before creating the user's account, you may experience periods of bot-driven automatic account creation spam wherein bots use the user registration form to create a large number of accounts in a short period of time. To prevent spam, Ares can either be configured to use a captcha challenge requirement on the user registration form (GCreateAccount.html) or user registration can be completely disabled for accounts created through standard Ares authentication from the registration form using the AresAuthUserRegistrationEnabled customization key.

Registration should not be disabled if you only allow users to register for accounts through the standard Ares account creation and authentication process. 
For more information on configuring these features, see Preventing Account Creation Spam in Ares.
Note: The AresAuthUserRegistrationEnabled key will only enable/disable user registration from your production Ares web pages and will not affect your TestWeb web pages. As of Ares Server v5.0.9/Web DLL v5.0.6, users cannot register for an Ares account using any authentication type from the TestWeb pages by default. This option is not configurable.

 

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