Webmaster Tips

Password Protection

Do you need some of your pages password protected? Want to include "staff only" or "members only" information on your site?

Well, you could just put up a page and not have any links to it. Normal people surfing your site wouldn't find it... but there are those pesky search engines, out there indexing everything in the universe, and believe me, they'll find it. And other people will then have access to your private info.

Fortnately, our servers are set up to handle your needs. The following is a function of one of the CGI tools, NetCloak, that we make available on all our servers. It may not be available on other web hosts.

To password protect a page, simply put the following in the page somewhere:

<REQUEST_PASSWORD realm ID,password>

Where

REALM is an identifier for the area you're entering
ID is the User ID that must be entered
password is, well, pretty obvious.

You can issue multiple ID/pass combinations for the same page like this:

<REQUEST_PASSWORD realm ID1,password1 ID2,password2 ID3,password3>

(obviously, IDs and Passwords can't have any spaces in them. And don't forget the space between realm and ID, and the comma between ID and password. )

Each page that is to be considered secure must include the Request_Password tag - you can't just put it on the Index page and expect all the other pages in that folder or all the pages that are linked from there to be password protected. Search engines have a way of finding those other pages...

Of course, when the page is loaded from the server, the whole line is stripped out. That way, if someone does a View Source on your page, they can't find out all the other passwords.