Stop users going directly to the forum-HOW?

[mixstar]

I am, at the moment, re-writing my website.

Users have been going to my forum directly. I want to make them go via the site now, if they use /forum I would like a message to come up and then an automatic re-direction to my home page. I have seen several sites that re-direct the user to the correct page in this manner.

Has anyone any suggestions?

Many thanks,

Mix

[Jake Bunce]

Put an index.html page with a refresh tag in your old forum directory.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.yoursite.com">

[mixstar]

But . . .

Originally posted by Jakeman
Put an index.html page with a refresh tag in your old forum directory.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.yoursite.com">

I know I can do this but will it do what I want? At the moment the users are gaining access to the forum via:

http://www.mysite.com/forum

What I want to do is re-direct them to:

http://www.mysite.com

if they use the direct route. In other words, if they go direct rather than via the site to re-direct them to the main site. I want to keep using the /forum directory so any code would have to be able to tell if the user came direct or via the main site. I do believe this is possible but I don't know how.

Thanks,

Mix

[filburt1]

Originally posted by mixstar
I know I can do this but will it do what I want? At the moment the users are gaining access to the forum via:

http://www.mysite.com/forum

What I want to do is re-direct them to:

http://www.mysite.com

if they use the direct route. In other words, if they go direct rather than via the site to re-direct them to the main site. I want to keep using the /forum directory so any code would have to be able to tell if the user came direct or via the main site. I do believe this is possible but I don't know how.

Thanks,

Mix

Untested PHP:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], "/yourhomepage.html") != false)
{
    header("Location: /yourhomepage.html");
    exit;
}

Theoretically putting that in phpinclude will redirect people who haven't entered via your page but it's not very clean (not everybody supports HTTP_REFERER and such).

[mixstar]

Originally posted by filburt1
Untested PHP:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], "/yourhomepage.html") != false)
{
    header("Location: /yourhomepage.html");
    exit;
}

Theoretically putting that in phpinclude will redirect people who haven't entered via your page but it's not very clean (not everybody supports HTTP_REFERER and such).

Thanks, I'll give that a try in the next couple of days when I'm ready for the modifications and I'll let you know how it works. Cheers,

Mix

Happy New Year

[Icheb]

You can't rely on the Referer since some users may not submit them at all when browsing the web. I think there are some proxy- or browsersettings which can prevent the Referer from being sent, so it would prevent some people from accessing the site.

[mixstar]

Originally posted by filburt1
Untested PHP:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], "/yourhomepage.html") != false)
{
    header("Location: /yourhomepage.html");
    exit;
}

Theoretically putting that in phpinclude will redirect people who haven't entered via your page but it's not very clean (not everybody supports HTTP_REFERER and such).

I tried the mod and it didn't work. I see there is an index.html file in the forum directory. I presume that when you go to the forum directory it would look at this first (after all, html is the default?) If this is the case I could trap anyone surfing direct to the forum via this file?

Thanks,

Mix