Lock download

jphilapy

Howdy,

I am looking for an app to meet the following need:

1) I want to allow users to download software from my site, but upon the condition that they supply an email address.

2) We have some competitors who may try and link to our download to save their own bandwidth, so we want to prevent them from linking to the specific file.

Problem is, how do you prevent them from linking to the file?

Any ideas of such a system? Or know of any way to do any of the above?

Thanks for your suggestions,
Jeff

trooper

OK just a few thoughts on your requirements

1) Check the users email address (regex required) and then if the email is valid (you may even want to do an mx record loookup to check that it is indeed a valid email), if the email works out fine then show the link to the file - if not then don't.

2) In conjunction with 1 you can use php to hold an array of email addresses that you do not want to have access to the download link. If you know what the address is of the competitors web site that is trying to "hot link" to your files then you can do something like $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] lookup. I had to do something very similar recently for a client and know that it is a

On dev articles there is a good article on generating one time use urls (that is where the urls only last for X time period - thus preventing "hot linking" on a permanent basis.

Anyway just some thoughts for you to be looking over

HTH