When creating a crowdsourced database, sometimes an email, web or social media campaign is involved to request that users create or update a profile.

Campaigns may have different goals. Common campaigns include:

Ideally all campaigns should support all scenarios and provide the appropriate calls to action for end users. It is important to remember that users will commonly not recall whether they have a profile in the locator or not. Invitation emails may have been forwarded, former contacts may no longer be avaiable etc.

The campaign call-to-action link can trigger the User Registration form by including the parameter shown below:

The ml___ml_trigger_registration=1 parameter causes the system to:

A claim campaign is used when you have specific locations in MetaLocator which should be updated by specific users. This implies that you can create a dynamically-generated link which requests that a specific user claim and update a specific location.

The ml___ml_trigger_claim_form=nnnn parameter causes the system to:

The ml___ml_trigger_claim_form parameter can also be passed the value of a configured external key field. This is a helpful shortcut when exporting the location ID and aligning it with an external marketing database is prohibitive. When an external key is provided for this parameter, &ml_trigger_externalkey=1 must also be indicated in the URL. For example:

The ml___ml_trigger_claim_form parameter can also be passed the MD5 hash of the MetaLocator Owner Account's API Key concatenated with the value of a configured external key field, separated by an underscore character. This is a security precaution which prevents URL tampering. For example, if a malicious actor receives an invitation link such as:

They could easily modify the value to

And attempt to trick the users managing your approval process into approving their access to the location with ID 11, providing that they also have access to the authentication data requested in your Registration Form. This underscores the importance of requesting private information in the Registration Form.

To avoid this scenario, instead of exposing the location ID, or external key value, the ml___ml_trigger_claim_form parameter can also be set to the MD5 hash of the MetaLocator Owner Account's API Key and the record's external key value, separated by an underscore character.

For example, a record's external key value may be 12345, and the API Key is 11223344556677889900aabbccddee.

The secure value of ml___ml_trigger_claim_form can be calculated as:

This link now drastically reduces a malicious actor's ability to guess other links.

To create a link which directs users to log in and then immediately redirects to a search for only their locations, use this link:

UTM parameters can be included in user-provided campaign links.

https://yourwebsite.com/locator?ml___ml_trigger_registration=1&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring2023

They will be stored along with the created user if the Registration Form is updated as shown below. UTM Parameter fields are not visible to the end user.

When configuring UTM Parameter fields, be sure to specify a unique custom field to store the data.

The UTM Parameter fields will be stored alongside other Custom Registration Fields in the User Manager.