Protecting links with PHP

norberto

Hi,

I would like to prevent users from downloading any files from a website without filling some sort of a form and confirming it with a confirmation e-mail.
What I really want to do is to generate an error message (page) when someone tries to download a file using a direct link (for example: www.mywebsite.com/docs/cv.pdf).
Is there a way to do this?
Thanks in advance,

Norberto Henriques

Anon

Create a script that looks for a username/password combination (this could be stored in a cookie) and if the user validates then send the file.

To make this clean looking you'll need to be able to modify the Apache httpd.conf so that it looks at the directory /docs/ as a file and parse what comes after the / as the file name to send. There is an article on this site showing how to do this. http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim19990117.php3

If you do it this way then you can send the password in an email to the user and validate them on there return.

ame12

What some sites do is to use the $HTTP_REFERER variable (this is a built-in CGI-style variable) that tells how the user got to the page. If this variable is filled in and has your site in it, you should allow the user to see the page. If not, you can redirect them to the home page (meta tag or 302 header redirect) where they can be forced to undergo further "scrutiny" :-).

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