Option to sponsor a Full listing (i.e. make a Full listing for someone else's site, as a donation or gift, so no way of verifying ownership)

[m-i-l]

A couple of people have requested this now:

• One simply wanted to donate to the project, but didn't have their own personal site, so asked if there could be a mechanism to sponsor one or more of their favourites sites for upgrading to a Full listing: "is there a place where site owners who don't necessarily need premium indexing to send some funds your way? Or some way to 'sponsor' premium indexing for a site you don't own (while avoiding the clear issue of commercial sites being sponsored)? I'd happily sponsor sites such as..."
• Another wanted to buy the full listing on behalf of another as a surprise gift: "I would like to pay for the full listing for a friend's blog. Since that requires proof of ownership and I can't complete the process myself. This will be a gift [so I can't get the site owner involved first]"

Now the focus is on tiers and Basic, Free Trial, and Full listings, this might be slightly less difficult to implement.

In terms of user flow, this could be a new question at "User selects allow public, and login & site ownership validation method" on https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/new-site-listing-workflow-and-search-as-a-service-improvements/ e.g. "Sponsored listing (no ownership validation)". Probably still want to capture the email of the sponsor at that point so they get the notification when it expires. Need to have a think about whether they get a login - if it is a simple sponsored listing (as per first request above) it probably won't be necessary, but if it is a gift (as per second request above) the site owner will probably want to be able to login and do the usual things at some point.

In terms of database schema, the new listing type would probably continue to be a tier 3 (Full listing). There isn't an explicit validation_method field in the main tblDomains now, having been replaced by a login_type (INDIEAUTH or PASSWORD), and a tblValidations with a validation_method (DCV or INDIEAUTH), and tblSubscriptions. Given ownership won't have been validated, probably want to update tblSubscriptions but not tblValidations, and set login_type or not depending on the question above about login, if that works.

In terms of Solr schema, there is still an owner_verified flag, used for the Owner verified filter on the Browse page. This is simply set if a listing is a tier 3 listing, so that would continue to work with the above changes, although the Owner verified filter should be changed to something like "Full listing".

Also wondering if a buymeacoffee.com or whatever link would be easier.