[FX.php List] Planning ahead for inactive processes

[Jonathan Schwartz]

Joel,

It's not the hits I'm concerned about.

It's the ability for users to access outdated pages from retired or 
temporarily retired processes, while the rest of the pages stay 
active.  That same process might be turned on again in 6 months, 
depending on customer need, so removal is not the answer.

An example: a blank email confirmation for an event that was held 
last year arrived over the weekend.  A bot must have hit the page. 
In this case, I needed to add a session handler that refused access 
to the page if the required conditions were not met: referring page, 
session, or data-related.

As I have found, closing the "front door" isn't a great solution 
either, as folks bookmark pages and bots scour the entire site.

Steve offered some great suggestions. I'm going to start using one of them.

Jonathan





At 7:33 AM -0800 2/25/08, Joel Shapiro wrote:
>Hey Jonathan
>
>Not sure I understand what the problem is.   Is it that you're 
>getting extra/unwanted hits on your server, or something else?  
>Couldn't you just remove the folder of php pages for that site, and 
>then the server would produce a standard (or customized) 404 html 
>error page?
>
>probably missing something,
>-Joel
>
>
>On Feb 25, 2008, at 7:01 AM, Jonathan Schwartz wrote:
>
>>Hi Folks,
>>
>>At an increasing rate, I'm seeing that bots and past visitors with 
>>bookmarks (?) are attempting to re-visit processes that have long 
>>been retired.  The purpose for the original pages has expired.  The 
>>original database might not even be running.
>>
>>I'm looking for how I can best plan ahead during development, to 
>>deal with the day that the pages are no longer valid.  It's no fun 
>>opening up the code after 6 months and re-learning.
>>
>>Obviously, simply removing the link to the start of the process 
>>isn't the solution.
>>
>>I'm thinking that one good option is to create a variable in 
>>server_data that serves as an on off switch or data limiter.  Page 
>>handling code at the top of each page could check for the variable 
>>to decide if the pages are still valid or not. I'd rather do it 
>>while the code is fresh in my mind rather than after.
>>
>>What do other folks do?
>>
>>J
>>--
>>Jonathan Schwartz
>>Exit 445 Group
>>jonathan at exit445.com
>>http://www.exit445.com
>>415-381-1852
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>
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-- 
Jonathan Schwartz
Exit 445 Group
jonathan at exit445.com
http://www.exit445.com
415-381-1852