Urgent HTML help needed!!

[Cyrus_the_virus]

Hi All,

I have been faced with a unique problem while i was creating a website. I have html and php pages. The problem is I have few pages which shouldn't be directly accessed.

For eg: Page1, Page2 and Page3

Now, I do not want anyone to access Page2, and Page3 directly. Page2 should be accessible only from Page1 and Page3 should be accessible only from Page2. So, one page is linked to the other. However anyone trying to access page2 and page3 directly with it's linked should get a 404 error.

Can anyone help? I need to resolve this before midnight tonight!!

[victor_rambo]

You can choose to prevent hotlinking. But I am not sure if that will work or not! Moreover, people whose browsers are set not to send referrrers may never be able to see the pages.

If nothing helps, PHP can do it for sure, though it a bit more complicated.
EDIT: I just realized that it would be more easier than anything with PHP!

[dheeraj_kumar]

You can do something using referrer links, although I dont know how to. Thats the complicated PHP rohan is talking about, I think.

[Cyrus_the_virus]

Originally Posted by rohan_shenoy

If nothing helps, PHP can do it for sure, though it a bit more complicated.
EDIT: I just realized that it would be more easier than anything with PHP!

I don't mind if it's php because, then i can just wrap the html inside the php, so as long as someone can tell me how to do it, it doesn't matter if it's php or html.

One thing that i was thinking of was to use mod_rewrite to mask the urls of all the pages to a single url, hence the end user wouldn't know the link for direct access to pages. eg: mask page1, page2, page3 url to http://abc.com/abc.php. Now the user can't tell what is the link to page2 or page3.

The only problem is I do not know how to use mod_rewrite!!

Originally Posted by dheeraj_kumar

You can do something using referrer links, although I dont know how to. Thats the complicated PHP rohan is talking about, I think.

It does not matter how complicated it is as long as someone can give me the entire script!!

[victor_rambo]

Just insert this snippet at the start of every page
The expected referer is the referer you want
Eg: in page2.php, expected is 'http://domain/page1.php', similarly for page 3

PHP Code:

if($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']!='expected referer')
{
header('Location: 404.php');//redirect to file not found error document
exit;
} 


And yeah, the 404.php should contain the snippet

PHP Code:

<?php
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
?>

[Cyrus_the_virus]

Thanks a lot, my job is done now.