I just don't get where Mikrotik is coming from, or who they think their target customers are.

I would love to be able to use UserManager to allow our cafe customers to signup by inputting an email address, then having usermanager send them their password, granting them a few minutes grace period to check their email.

That's a pretty common request.

And pretty easily doable on the router, if it worked.

I heard that signup without payment was enabled in the latest beta, unfortunately, the beta is broken (according to Normis) and we should use the latest stable version.

Unfortunately, the latest stable version is old, MT not having produced a stable version is a while, and doesn't support signup unless a payment method is specified.

I can get the signup page to load, but I would have to make the paypal link go to some other place, capture the email address, and do some sort of scripting to generate the password and email it to the user.

Basically, I'd have to write my own user manager.

Does anyone have any scripting they've done to accomplish this?

It's been a feature request forever, MT says from time to time that they'll someday add it - other times they say they never will...

In any event, I'm starting to think MT is now following in the footsteps of dd-wrt, where every release has something major broken.

我仍然喜欢太产品——但来吧——专注啊n making stuff work instead of introducing junk like the meta router.

In all fairness you wouldn't have to write your own User Manager, you'd just have to write a script that inserts a user name without processing a payment. That's a very, very far cry from writing a RADIUS implementation with full accounting capabilities. If the API can script User Manager - no idea if it can, I don't use UM - this wouldn't be hard to do.
This is also fairly easy to implement yourself with any other RADIUS server that goes off a database you can otherwise access, and very little web programming. FreeRADIUS and MySQL would need very little configuration from an out of the box deployment, and PHP/Perl/Python/whatever could do this in well under 100 lines.
There may also be other prepackaged RADIUS solutions for free or for pay than can do this.

I realize you just wanted to vent frustration and the vendor not implementing a feature that you really want and need yet, so this are just in case you were looking for viable workarounds.

Yeah - I'm venting - though if I could find a decent workaround, that would be great.

有slew of AP management products out there, but they all take one of two approaches:

1> Monetize the wifi

or

2> Force the use of really crappy hardware and then charge a small fortune to manage it.

My needs are simple.

We provide free wifi to our retail customers.

I don't control usage beyond setting bandwidth quotas and blocking p2p.
I wouldn't care about the p2p, but I can't afford to lose our connection due to dmca violations.

P2P violators get banned temporarily, but I have no way to notify them, since they are identifiable only by mac address.

I suppose I can cobble together something out of FreeRadius, though I'm terrible with coding.

If someone out there wants to sell me their custom scripting that does what I want, now would be a good time, since I'm sure Mikrotik will release a final version of 5.0 with a functioning UM Real Soon Now.

You could pre-generate a bunch of vouchers and just hand them out with the receipt, or on request, when the customer buys something. (unless you're specifically trying to collect email addresses).

I found what I was looking for- Radius Manager.

Walked through the prep on my laptop today. Should have my license tomorrow.

Uneventful so far - excellent documentation.

I'm optimistic.