Concealing a URL's Name

aven

I am currently developing a website that will feature downloads of user purchased ebooks, templates, fonts, etc.

I have gotten really good at coding, but still need a few pointers here and there. Does anyone know of a script or function that will conceal or change a url's name for each visit? This way, once a user downloads fdabs.pdf, they can't simply give the link to someone else to use because it will be different next time.

I would really appreciate the assistance on this one. Thank You.

MarkR

Probably your best bet is to require some kind of authentication, so that even if the user gives the URL to their friends, they can't get it.

Of course they could give the authentication info to their friends too, and they'd be able to get it.

You could detect when a download has been completed, and deactivate that item for that user after a specified period (so they can still retry if they get disconnected).

Mark

bbreslauer

I don't know of any script, but you could probably create one. Here's how it could work:

Person clicks on a link to download ebook. That link goes to a blank (to the user) page.

This blank page has some code which will create an entry in a database or file with a random string followed by the file that they want to download. The user is then immediately redirected to a page with that random string in the url (perhaps dl.php?s=[random string goes here])

The dl.php script fetches the file (which would need to be outside of the webroot, so that the user can't simply find the file from the filename) and then deletes the corresponding entry from the database or file. This way, they need to go back to the download link in order to redownload the file, and can't simply give the link to someone else, because the entry in the database would have already been deleted, so dl.php wouldn't know what file to get.

Roger_Ramjet

Preventing multiple downloads is the least of your worries because in the end they are going to be able to just give their friends the file once they have downloaded it. That is why MS and others have gone for online-activation of their software once installed.