htaccess nightmares, can you help this newbie?!

[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)