Can PHP help?: Want certain webpages as site usage only!

whr76

Newbie desires a quick pointer to where to look:

I have a website that has one page that is quite large and thus takes a bit of bandwidth...I suspect that some users have bookmarked IT as a "Favorite" instead of the main index page or another "less resource using" page...

I'd like to give some kind a warning message and potentially block access to the long page unless they came from any other page on my site, such as main index, or maybe certain selected other pages on my site.

Is PHP a potential solution for this? Thanks!

thorpe

Is PHP a potential solution for this?

Yes. You would just need to check the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] variable to see where abouts your users are comming from and act accordingly.

MarkR

If you block it based on referrer, you will

Lock out people who run firewalls (or whose ISP runs firewalls, or employer runs content scanners) which block REFERER.
Stop search engines seeing it

Why do you want to do this? Can't you simply make the page cheaper? Bandwidth is really cheap anyway.

Mark

madwormer2

If you want them to HAVE to visit the main page first, set a session variable on the main page, such as "visit = 1" and then on the page u want to prevent direct access, check to see if visit = 1, and if it doesn't, tell them that they should have come from a page on your website.

whr76

MarkR wrote:
Why do you want to do this? Can't you simply make the page cheaper? Bandwidth is really cheap anyway.

Why? Because...
1) ... site design is such that, by going to this page directly, they will miss certain important messages about the site found only on main page.
2) ... although bandwidth is cheap, my present web host (a VERY small outfit) is planning an increase in charges and by reducing my usage, my monthly costs will stay closer to current, which is within my budget. Planned charges are not!
3) ... by going thru main page, they see an extract of this page which will, in 95% or so of cases, give all the info they need to see...and be 1-5% of size of this page. They can then go to 'long" page if they wish...but need is greatly reduced.

Madwormer2: Now THAT is an idea that I can understand!
I do only want to make them realize that going there directly is not desired...

whr76

madwormer2 wrote:
If you want them to HAVE to visit the main page first, set a session variable on the main page, such as "visit = 1" and then on the page u want to prevent direct access, check to see if visit = 1, and if it doesn't, tell them that they should have come from a page on your website.

It's been QUITE a while since my thread was active, but I'm now getting back to this issue.

Anyway, could someone point me to a simple example of how to accomplish the above testing? All the samples I've seen are a bit too complicated for this newbie.

leatherback

On every page, all the way at the top:

<?php
session_start();
if(! $_SESSION['mainpage'])
  {
  header("Location: http://www.mainpage/");
  }
?>

Except on the mainpage:

<?php
session_start();
$_SESSION['mainpage'] = true;
?>

whr76

Leatherback: Thanks for that sample code! It was easy enough for me to follow without any books...but now that today I've borrowed a couple from library, I've got some followup questions:

1) I'm presuming if instead of sending users back to main page, I could use the header stmt to send a HTTP error code msg instead? Such as a 401 Unauthorized?

2) I'd need an easy way for me to access any page directly without this block, since I'm the site owner! I can't use cookies as I may be on another computer that doesn't allow it. Is there some mechanism that would handle this?

3) In some examples, after the header stmt, I've seen an "exit ()" stmt used. What makes that a good or bad idea? I don't find any reason why to or why not.