Building interstitial page by cookies or sessions?

iBuddy

I have 50+ sites that I would like to build a interstitial system for. Basically what I need to do is have a way for each site to detect by cookies or session if they have visited that site within 24 hours. If they haven't I want to redirect them to a Interstitial page. On the interstitial page I would like to redirect them back to previous page.

I am so stumped on how to build this. Sessions you can not pass through different sites right? In other words if I have www.domain1.com and www.domain2.com I cant pass the session information right?

So would cookies be the right way to code this? But what if a user does not have cookies enabled?

The overall goal of what I want to do is the following:
-redirect users to interstitial page within 24 hour period
-no more then 1 time will they be sent to interstitial page
-interstitial page will redirect them back to original page

Anybody help out?

iBuddy

Nobody knows how I should approach this?

NogDog

iBuddy wrote:
Nobody knows how I should approach this?

Nah, we're just scared by words like "interstitial". 😉

Unless you're making users log in and can then track their activities via a database, cookies are probably your best solution. I suppose you could track usage by IP address and a database. Cookies have the downside that a given user might not be accepting cookies. IP addresses have the downside that users' addresses can change, depending on what ISP they are connecting through.

iBuddy

Nah I dont want to use a database, there is no need for that. Again, I have 3 different servers that I will be using this for for over 50 sites. I would need to use sessions or cookies. Possibly both? I dont know where to start to set this up.

bpat1434

You could always set three cookies, one for each domain. Then just update the cookie as necessary. So when they visit a site (or any page on that site) you update the cookie. The cookie value is nothing more than a Unix Timestamp.

The interstitial page would be if the user is outside the 24-hour time-limit or does not have a cookie. If they don't have cookies enabled, send them to a secondary area, or post information through a hidden form back to the page they came from to start a session on that page. ONly downside is they'd always see the interstitial page if they close their browser.

Basically, it would work something like this:

User A => Cookie Enabled Browser
User B => Cookie Disabled Browser

User A enters site 1. User A has no cookie for Site 1 and is sent to interstitial page. Interstitial page instantiates 3 cookies (one for each domain). User A is redirected to Site 1 with cookies. User A reaches site 1, the cookie is found, the timestamp is within 24 hours, the user is allowed in. Site 1 cookie is updated with new timestamp (if you wish). User A travels to site 2 after 3 hours of viewing site 1. The cookies are found, the site 2 cookie is updated with a new timestamp (if you wish) and the user is allowed in. User A waits 19 hours (for a total of 25 hours) to browse to site 3. Site 3 sees the cookie, note's it's greater than 24 hours, and sends to interstitial page where the process starts over again.

User B enters Site 2. Site 2 sees no cookies and redirects to interstitial page. Interstitial page sees cookies aren't available and posts a hidden form to Site 2 to start a session. Site 2 sees the posted form, starts a session with a timestamp as a value in the array. User browses to Site 1. Site 1 sees no cookie or session, redirects to interstitial page where the process starts over again.

It's overly simplified, but for all intents and purposes you would probably use a mix of both Sessions and Cookies to get what you're after. Not sure if that's exactly what you want, but it's what I would see you wanting.

NogDog

Of course, there is another option: don't mess with your visitors and just let them navigate where they want, the way they do on 99.99% of the rest of the internet. 🙂 (I'm sure you have a good reason for going to this trouble; just make sure it does not negatively impact the user experience and possibly drive users away.)

iBuddy

Interstitial ads are good with the right advertisers reaching the target traffic. I run a bunch of hip hop sites and advertisers want to advertise their albums for example.

I still need to figure out how to map this out. Bpat you got the right idea, however I have over 40-50 sites where im going to be doing this for on 3 different dedicated servers. I guess how Im going to do it is by cookies and sessions but nobody has answered my question.

Can you have a session on 1 domain and another domain on 2 different domains and dedicated server boxes? Or are sessions only for the same domain name?

bpat1434

Can you have a session on 1 domain and another domain on 2 different domains and dedicated server boxes? Or are sessions only for the same domain name?

Sessions, I believe are per-server-per-site. So you have unique sessions on each server, and unique sessions for each site on that server.

One thing you could try is defining the session key in the [man]session_start/man call and see if site 1 on server 1 can start a session named "testing" and site 2 on server 1 can also call a session named "testing" and see if they can read eachother.

Weedpacket

iBuddy wrote:
Nobody knows how I should approach this?

http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10220471