R U a History Buff?

CodeX

Hi, I have a site that offers discounts only if you come from certain sites.

WHat i want is for to check if they came from that domain or not, if not then they are kicked to the normal price page, otherwise they can see the page with specials on it.

How can i check where they came from and do the above mentiond action?

Thnx

daynah

You may want to try checking the variable $HTTP_REFERER

This gives you the referrer to your site. You can read more about it here . 🙂

CodeX

Thnx for the prompt reply Daynah...

This will work, but is there a better, more secure way?

'HTTP_REFERER'
The address of the page (if any) which referred the user agent to the current page. This is set by the user agent. Not all user agents will set this, and some provide the ability to modify HTTP_REFERER as a feature. In short, it cannot really be trusted.

just that as it said, it can be tricked!

jerdo

That is pretty much the only way to check the referrer unless you want to create an affiliate program and give all the sites an id then you can check the id and set the price from there.

theslinky

technically even the affiliate thing can backfire... if the person is really bored and has a lot of time in their hands, they can keep trying different affiliate IDs till one works

you can of course select random IDs and assign them :-)

i think the HTTP referer should be good enough unless you suspect most of the people visiting your site are very knowledgable and know how to fake their http-referer variables.

at my sharptoner site, I too have discounts for people who visit from certain domains (i.e. places I advertise in).

What i do is setup a special URL and submit that for advertisements. that way people who click the ad will get the 10% discount and people who come to the main site won't :-)

this might be a good solution if your scenario is similar to mine.

-sridhar

CodeX

Hi, Yes Slinky, our situation is quite simular, we have several advertising locations and each earns different discount levels.

We are a hosting company that wants to prevent people from finding the discounted urls and just passing them about, posting on message boards and so on.

This hurts both us (inc. our advertising stratergies) and our partners.

We already generate a random account number based on parts of their name and a unique 4 digit number - I guess we could tweek this for our affiliate program too.

Thnx for all your help folks - we appreciate it.

Regards,

Charlie
http://www.intelliwebtech.com