Pdfs into articles

[dunks]

Hi

Ive currently got alot of articles saves as pdf's in tp blocks on my forum.

I have a folder set up called pdf for which i save all the pdf's into and then link them like this

<iframe src="http://www.peugeot306cabrioletclub.co.uk/pdf/306ph1pug.pdf" height="1050" width="100%"></iframe>
<center></center><iframe src="http://www.peugeot306cabrioletclub.co.uk/pdf/ph1.pdf" height="1050" width="100%"></iframe>
<center></center>

The concern I have is that the forum is for registered members only, but anybody can access these pdf's by simply going straight to the correct web address, Is there a way of changing this ?

[Freddy]

You could password protect the folder.  Then they can't get in, but your code should still be able to access it.  I think that would work - I used that method on one of my sites.

[dunks]

I tried that, but it would meen a different password to the members usuall log in , can it be set up to use the forum log in details

[Freddy]

Hmm well the trouble is you would have to use your host's control panel to keep adding users to the password protected directory.  Unless there is some other way, but I don't personally know it.

An iframe is just going to be treated like any other web page, so things like .htaccess files and CHMOD is not going to work because it will block even registered users.

I can't think of a way of doing this really apart from you just have one password and username and you distribute it somehow to registered users - maybe having a board with restricted access that will display the username and password only to registered members.

There must be some other way, but I am sorry that's currently all I can think of.

[JPDeni]

One thing you could do is use a different folder name that isn't as obvious. Instead of calling the folder pdf, call it fred or something. People would be less likely to be able to figure out where the file is.

Would non-registered folks have any idea of what the names of the files are, even if they accessed the folder? You usually can set a folder so that it's contents are not listable, just by accessing the folder itself. Or you could add a simple index.html page into the folder that just says something like "you aren't supposed to be here." That would prevent the file names from being listed.

Another thing that might work is if you have a cgi-bin. Sometimes they are set up so that files can be accessed by other programs, but not directly from a folder in the cgi-bin.

If I was concerned about it, I would probably do all three things. But you have to remember that anything which is on the internet is, at the end of the day, available to anyone else on the internet. You can put some blocks in the way, but there is no way to keep anything private on the 'net.

[bloc]

If you use TP Download manager, you could upload them into a category where the permission is set to members only.

When they dl from that they can't dl directly from the tp-files folder(thats where all uploaded files from TP go), the script decides who can download it, based on permissions.