philmeyer — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:26:51 +0000

By the way, what happens if a visitor's browser has cookies turned off?

philmeyer — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:17:32 +0000

Thanks Greg K and webwiz! Now let me confess something: Although I've been dabbling in web design for a number of years, I'm a total noob when it comes to either .htaccess files or cookies (I wouldn't recognize a cookie if it bit me on the butt!).

Could one of you point me in the right direction to learn about cookies - or better yet, just tell me (in some detail) how to solve my immediate problem?

webwiz — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 04:30:47 +0000

A quick google confirms what Greg says - using .htaccess is unreliable. I suggest you set an identifying cookie with mysite.com/members/content.php - then test for that cookie in your mysite.com/downloads/ folder files. You will need a PHP file in that folder, of course, but having an index.php file there will prevent access to the directory listing (if it's not otherwise blocked).

Greg K — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:34:54 +0000

As you are wanting to do this with just the .htaccess file (which it can be, I jsut don't recall ofhand the coding) I'm moving this to the more appropriate area on the forums.

On thing to not though, this is not completely reliable for two reasons, 1. you can fake this value, 2. some people browse with this blocked, weather they know it or not. I'm not sure if it still does, but at least for a while Norton Antivirus by default install would block this.

-Greg