So I have makerspace with 100+ members. Thanks to airtable, we have a status if they're active or inactive (current members vs members who quit). Many of us make files that we share with the membership for lasercut SVGs, or 3D print files. Within our airtable database we know their status, name, wiki account and wiki password. By wiki, we have a dokuwiki site that members have sign-in capability to. If they quit, we can turn that off. So we can control if they can see the url to download, but this doesn't mean that they can't be sent the url by a friend to download, or have a saved list of links before they quit.
So I'm thinking that legit members can use a form link to request a file, then we write an automation that gets the file and emails it to them. Also, to complicate matters a little further, I'm thinking about storing the files on a google drive or dropbox to avoid attachment size limits on our airtable team account, but I am thinking this can be handled in javascript.
I guess I have this all worked out in my head, I'm just wondering if the experts here think that is the best way, or if I'm overcomplicating it.
Edit: of course anyone can get a file and email it to people, so there's no way of making it perfectly private. I am just thinking that I don't want some screen scraper or something to be able to have the URLs on another site. Emailing of the file is just a padlock, not a vault. 🙂
Thanks.
Jeff Johnson
President, ChattLab Makerspace
