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Posted by Mitja on 06/08/05 18:26
On Wed, 08 Jun 2005 17:18:12 +0200, Roy Schestowitz
<newsgroups@schestowitz.com> wrote:
> Martin Magnusson wrote:
>
>> diablo wrote:
>>> I want to offer a download to people for a certain amount of time -
>>> after the link expires.
>>
>> I don't believe that's possible using only HTML. You would have to
>> remove the file manually or have a server-side script to automate it.
>
> Set up a cron job for the day of expiry, say:
> 20 22 24 * * cp ~/index2.html ~/index.html; rm ~/index2.html
Which is still a server side script, although admittedly not one that
interacts with the server. And using cron for this kind of job is at best
not overly elegant, either...
I'd go for a database (can ba plain-textfile based one) with valid/active
"passwords". Each time a user pays for the book, your script generates a
new password (usu called a hash, since it's just a long mess of randomly
mixed characters and numbers) and adds it to the database along with a
timestamp. The password is given to the user. If he wants to download the
book, he must pass this code to a script which checks whether the code
exists in the database at all and whether it's expired already or not. If
all's fine, it sends the book, else an error message.
This way you can also track misuses (e.g. one password used 50 times) or
warn users if you see they haven't yet donwloaded the book but their code
is about to expire, etc etc.
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