htaccess nightmares, can you help this newbie?!

[DidtheButler]

Hello everyone, I have a common question, but have searched the web for days now and can't find anything that answers this specific one.

HTACCESS is hell bent on trying to kill me. No matter what tutorial I read and how much I follow it to the letter (I mean, I am smart, I drank through at least a year and a half of college if I can remember that far back)...the darn thing excludes everyone and bounces all back to the reroute page.

So here's the real question: I have several AVS's all feeding into the SAME content pages, in the same folders (obviously). Is it possible to protect the pages while not interrupting the good visitor's stay? Do people with multiple AVS affiliations double upload everything so each AVS has their own content folder?

Any advice ANYONE can offer would be greatly appreciated...I will probably be here at my computer until I figure it out, or until I turn into a pile of bones, filled with spider webs....in which case I may not be able to respond to your messages as quickly.

I can be found on Yahoo Messenger at DidTheButler and on ICQ at 198296356.

On a slightly different topic...I had an AVS load my sites yesterday morning and almost instantly the pages started moving with what I would consider unreasonably strong traffic for a new site....can anyone share the things that should send up warning flags that you're being linked?

Thanks again, hope to hear from someone soon...I'm going to smoke a cigarette or 20 now.

~Kyle

[sarettah]

Kyle,

I cannot help right this minute, but I will be available in an hour or so.

Hopefully you will check back here :)

[Inabon]

here's my 2 cents
htaccess.
the problem here is the members area protection.

what is writing to your 1 htaccess file how do you let new people in how is the access controled by your avs service.

if avs 1 writes to htaccess then avs 2 writes to that may be a problem.


about traffic you may have to check and see if any of the avs services puts you on a link list. they should not be hotlinking from the inside.

on a paranoid note you may want to make sure they are not allowing others to see your content. as in create fake sites with your content. :)

[Trev]

On a slightly different topic...I had an AVS load my sites yesterday morning and almost instantly the pages started moving with what I would consider unreasonably strong traffic for a new site....can anyone share the things that should send up warning flags that you're being linked?

I've worked AVS sites and know that new sites can get alot of hits from the internal AVS link lists, it does die off so I hope your site is built for selling to the 'already credit card using' traffic.

As for being 'linked' check the stats for your AVS sites inside page's referers, if they're not coming from the AVS then you know.

[DidtheButler]

Thanks for the quick replies, and yes Saretta, I'll be around whenever you get a chance! I appreciate it!

I found my host has a one-click anti-linking button for directories on our server. I set that in motion and within about an hour traffic started to slow. It's a mystery to me really...All of our reference pages were coming from either our own site, or this partiular AVS....well, that and 'bookmark'...which I found out can mean any number of things. And our click thru affiliates saw an increase in traffice (and even a few purchases!). We were thinking a few hundred clicks a day would set us on cloud nine....were we underestimating? We've clocked 2500 unique hits in the last 48 hours...just seems like a LOT! But, as you said, traffic will slow...and it already has started. BACK to the drawing boards. :)

I'm more worried about the htaccess part now...if I have to separate out each AVS into it's own area areas and ask the AVS's to adjust their listings it'd bum me out. As well as multiply my storage usage since I'd be ceated the site six times over...with six different (but equal sized) content folders (one for each AVS we have). Did I follow that right? Ick...I'll keep you all posted. Thanks again for your help!

~Kyle

[sarettah]

Originally posted by DidtheButler@Apr 25 2005, 04:15 PM
I can be found on Yahoo Messenger at DidTheButler and on ICQ at 198296356.

Unfortunately, I already have too many people in my icq list to keep track of now, so hopefully you end up coming back here and seeing that someone is attempting to answer this :)

You asked:

So here's the real question: I have several AVS's all feeding into the SAME content pages, in the same folders (obviously). Is it possible to protect the pages while not interrupting the good visitor's stay? Do people with multiple AVS affiliations double upload everything so each AVS has their own content folder?


I assume you are talking about non exclusive avs's first of all as if you have them marked as exclusive then you only want to give access to THAT particular avs (imho)

So, for non exclusive avs, this is what I do. I create 2 levels. The first level is the main site directory.

ie: mysite.com/sitefolder/

in there I put my index page and only my index page.

I create an htaccess file that only allows access to this page to the avs's I have signed up for (I alos always include a backdoor for myself allowing access from one of my domains subfolders, but thats a different story)

ie:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://avssite1.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.avssite1.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://avssite2.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.avssite2.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://avssite3.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.avssite3.com/.*$ [NC]

ReWriteRule .*\.(htm|HTM|html|HTML)$ http://www.myothersite.com/index.htm[R,L]

Something like that, I am not an htaccess guru so other folks might have some more widlcarding that can help.

Inside that directory a create another directory for everything in the site that is past the index page.

ie: mysite.com/sitefolder/sitepages/

In there is the rest of the site (index page links to the main page in here and the main page links to all other pages)

I create an htaccess file that only allows access to this page from pages that are coming from my site.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mysite.com/sitefolder/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mysite.com/sitefolder/.*$ [NC]

ReWriteRule .*\.(htm|HTM|html|HTML)$ http://www.myothersite.com/index.htm[R,L]

So that way, if they did not come from one of the avs's I have listed in the primary, they can't get to the index page. The secondary htaccess only has to control if the page was requested from my site because they couldn't be requesting a page from my site if they did not come from the avs in the first place.

down in the mysite.com/sitefolder/sitepages/ folder I put a directory called images

ie: mysite.com/sitefolder/sitepages/images/ that my pages pull the images from and I do basic hotlink protection in htaccess for that folder.

Did that make it perfectly cloudy :)

Hope it helped in some small way.

(disclaimer: everything you read here could be wrong)

[Trev]

Originally posted by sarettah@Apr 26 2005, 12:26 AM
(disclaimer: everything you read here could be wrong)
It's the same kind of thing I did and it worked then :okthumb:

[sarettah]

Just a note on this... a newbie no no so to speak.

This guy came looking for some help.

I don't know if my post or anyone elses helped him.

But, I do know that he saw the post and most probably read the fucker because I caught his name at the bottom of the screen as looking at the thread after I posted the message. I also saw that he came back several times.

yet, he made no effort to acknowledge that someone had attempted to help his fucking ass.

If you ask for help on a board and someone offershelp, even if it doesn't help you, you say thanx dammit.

Doesn't take much fucking effort and let's people know that you appreciate that they went out of their way for you even though they don't know you from shit.

Just my opinion dammit, but commmon decent courtesy is NEVER wrong.

[JizBiz]

Originally posted by sarettah@Apr 28 2005, 04:13 PM
Just a note on this... a newbie no no so to speak.

This guy came looking for some help.

I don't know if my post or anyone elses helped him.

But, I do know that he saw the post and most probably read the fucker because I caught his name at the bottom of the screen as looking at the thread after I posted the message. I also saw that he came back several times.

yet, he made no effort to acknowledge that someone had attempted to help his fucking ass.

If you ask for help on a board and someone offershelp, even if it doesn't help you, you say thanx dammit.

Doesn't take much fucking effort and let's people know that you appreciate that they went out of their way for you even though they don't know you from shit.

Just my opinion dammit, but commmon decent courtesy is NEVER wrong.
I loved the post!

.htaccess always messes with my head as well..lol

Thanks for the input!

[Trev]

Sar has a point though...

Manners would be nice when seeking help.... Even if the advice doesn't fix anything!