"force" user to use site in defined order?

Hello,

I am preparing a site where it is important that the user moves from
page 1 to page 2 to page 3 etc as a series of tests are presented and
the order is important.

Is it possible to make sure that this happens?!

One thought I've had is that to stop a user arriving at say page 2 by
using Google, I can put all these pages into a password protected
folder (using htaccss/htpasswd). The users would be presented with the
same user name and password on the public page. Is there any other
way?

'would appreciate any thoughts on this.

Cheers

Geoff

"Geoff Cox" <gcox (AT) freeuk (DOT) notcom> wrote

Hello,

I am preparing a site where it is important that the user moves from
page 1 to page 2 to page 3 etc as a series of tests are presented and
the order is important.

Is it possible to make sure that this happens?!

No.

Make the all the same page and control the content server side, probably
with a session.

--
Richard.

On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:04:36 GMT, "rf" <rf (AT) invalid (DOT) com> wrote:

"Geoff Cox" <gcox (AT) freeuk (DOT) notcom> wrote in message
news:h3j3v315jrg4ttj011l8r0ajodatgasaas (AT) 4ax (DOT) com...
Hello,

I am preparing a site where it is important that the user moves from
page 1 to page 2 to page 3 etc as a series of tests are presented and
the order is important.

Is it possible to make sure that this happens?!

No.

Make the all the same page and control the content server side, probably
with a session.

I've thought of putting all on the one page - trouble is that would
involve a lot of scrolling ...

Could you say what you mean by "control the content server side,
probably with a session"?

Cheers

Geoff

Use a server-side validation using sessions and throw the user on the
page he should be if he tries to access another one.

Scripsit Geoff Cox:

I am preparing a site where it is important that the user moves from
page 1 to page 2 to page 3 etc as a series of tests are presented and
the order is important.

What makes you think this is an HTML question, or a JavaScript question?
Followups set to the the group where this is less off-topic than in the
other. In future, please select _a_ group properly. (Hint: use
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.misc if you think it's about WWW
authoring but you cannot select a more specific group.)

Is it possible to make sure that this happens?!

No.

One thought I've had is that to stop a user arriving at say page 2 by
using Google, I can put all these pages into a password protected
folder (using htaccss/htpasswd). The users would be presented with the
same user name and password on the public page. Is there any other
way?

That does not prevent people from accessing page 2 first. They just need
the password from a pal. Or something like that.

But it would piss off users.

You can use <meta> tags to ask indexing robots not to index pages 2, 3,
etc. Most of them will honor the request. Does this leave you some
_real_ problems? Which? What will happen, really, if someone views page
2 before viewing page 1? The world, as we know it, will end? You will be
prosecuted? The user sees a spoiler?

If this is a _real_ problem, please re-raise it in a more appropriate
forum and explain what you are really doing and what your server-side
programming capabilities and skills are.

You would probably get reasonably close by arranging things so that page
2 has no direct address of its own and page 1 contains a form consisting
only of a submit button and some hidden field(s), and the form would
have method="POST". The action="..." attribute would refer to a
server-side script that checks its data for the presence of some
specific field(s) with specific value(s) (as specified in the hidden
field[s] of the form); if they are present, the script would return the
content of page 2, otherwise an error code and an error explanation
page.

Of course, the "protection" would be easy to break, but only by someone
who is really interested and studies the techniques used. For a safer
approach, you would make page 1 dynamically generated and would make the
hidden field be different for each occasion, and your server would
contain a file of generated hidden field values and would remove a value
as soon as it has been found in a request. That is, for each page 1
generated, page 2 could be accessed _once_. So page 2 would resemble the
scrolls in Rogue, the game (you know, "as you read the scroll, it
vanishes").

Now, there's the simple problem of a user who has so accessed page 2 and
saves a local copy of it and uploads it on a server. I hope your next
question won't be "How do I prevent people from saving my page?"

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

In article <v5p3v3lb8rh0vvnsgcjlmo63gqrea38j62 (AT) 4ax (DOT) com>,
Geoff Cox <gcox (AT) freeuk (DOT) notcom> wrote:

I've thought of putting all on the one page - trouble is that would
involve a lot of scrolling ...

A lot of scrolling? You mean three pages worth? Who do you think your
audience is, wimps and wusses? Come on Geoff, grab this thing by the
horns and take the easy way out.

If you want to assist these delicate scrolling averse users, you can
stick in an id or two and link within the page. For example you might
want the sections that have to be filled in to be separated by some sort
of height chasm not to influence answers to the test in the earlier
sections by the eyeballing of the questions in the subsequent sections.

--
dorayme

On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, Geoff Cox wrote:

I am preparing a site where it is important that the user moves from
page 1 to page 2 to page 3 etc

"I am the publisher of a newspaper where it is important that the
reader moves from page 1 to page 2 to page 3 etc. How do I do this?"

--
In memoriam Alan J. Flavell
http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...Alan.J.Flavell

On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:54:05 +0100, Geoff Cox <gcox (AT) freeuk (DOT) notcom>
wrote:

Thanks everyone for the useful comments - will work through them now.

Cheers

Geoff

Ben Bacarisse wrote:

Geoff Cox <gcox (AT) freeuk (DOT) notcom> writes:
On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:04:36 GMT, "rf" <rf (AT) invalid (DOT) com> wrote:
"Geoff Cox" <gcox (AT) freeuk (DOT) notcom> wrote in message
news:h3j3v315jrg4ttj011l8r0ajodatgasaas (AT) 4ax (DOT) com...
I am preparing a site where it is important that the user moves from
page 1 to page 2 to page 3 etc as a series of tests are presented and
the order is important.

Is it possible to make sure that this happens?!
No.

Make the all the same page and control the content server side, probably
with a session.

Full ACK.

[...]
You store a cookie on the client side. Your server displays page one
if the cookie is missing. Page one sets the cookie to show that page
1 has been seen. The "next" button just re-loads the page but now the
server will show page 2. Rinse and repeat.

If cookies are not acceptable, you can do this with form data.

Cookies are as susceptible to a forging attack as is form data.
http://getfirebug.com/ and see how easy it actually is.


PointedEars
--
Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on
a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web,
when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another
computer, another word processor, or another network. -- Tim Berners-Lee

Ben Bacarisse wrote:

Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars (AT) web (DOT) de> writes:
Ben Bacarisse wrote:
snip
If cookies are not acceptable, you can do this with form data.
Cookies are as susceptible to a forging attack as is form data.
http://getfirebug.com/ and see how easy it actually is.

Of course. I never suggested otherwise.

IBTD. Did you or did you not suggest that storing cookies or form data
would be a way to "'force' [a] user to use [a] [Web] site in [a] defined order?

I have disproved that.


F'up2 comp.infosystems.www.authoring.misc

PointedEars
--
Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on
a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web,
when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another
computer, another word processor, or another network. -- Tim Berners-Lee