[Pro] Password Protected URL

Have a user who wants to have a page that is password protected, but that then it would automatically send him an email notifying him that a person logged into the page. Something like a relay? I didn’t think this could be done with the Password Protected URL action. Maybe an additional script? Any thought?


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The Password Protected URL Action is a cheap parlor trick. Anyone who reads the source can see what it does – you enter a “password” and when you press enter, the browser is redirected with javascript to [password].html. If that page exists, you see it, and if not, you get a 404 error. It’s only “security through obscurity”, whereby someone is not all that likely to guess that you have a page called as94Gcks.html in your server. Once that URL leaks out on to Google (and it will, if your page contains any links at all that resolve outside of your domain), the secret is out and you won’t be able to keep people from seeing the page unless you rename it (and change the “password” to match). Since JavaScript can’t send mail, this isn’t going to be any kind of a platform to build upon to solve the rest of your problem, either.

What you’re going to need is a real password system based on a server-side scripting language and a database of some sort. I haven’t heard of one that sends an e-mail whenever a visitor logs in, but there are many that do create a running log of access. You can find quite a collection of these at http://hotscripts.com (best to search in the PHP category – that’s the easiest to find support for on a shared hosting server, which is very likely what you have your site on). You will see that some are paid and others are free. In my experience, paid equals at least a passing chance that there will be someone to help you install and configure the thing. Free is nice, but you end up doing your own debugging and installing, or pay someone else to do it.

Walter

On Feb 23, 2012, at 1:08 PM, Roxane Abbate wrote:

Have a user who wants to have a page that is password protected, but that then it would automatically send him an email notifying him that a person logged into the page. Something like a relay? I didn’t think this could be done with the Password Protected URL action. Maybe an additional script? Any thought?


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thanks, will forward this to the user.


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