Securing download links on membership and product pages to prevent link sharing

Article Details
URL: http://support.nanacast.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=127
Article ID: 127
Created On: 29 Mar 2010 02:48 PM

Answer

The best way to secure links to files in your membership pages is to add Amazon s3 hosting account to your profile in Nanacast. Once you do that, make sure to enable download files/podcast for the membership on the Edit Listing step. Next, add each file you want to protect as an episode. It is not necessary for the file to have content, and you can uncheck the option to display it as a page. 

We recommend you upload files or bulk files via the S3 file manager or by using free third-party applications like S3fox Plugin for Firefox. Keep the ACL security settings in Amazon to private for all files you upload.When you upload to Amazon S3 outside of Nanacast, just leave the ACL for those files set to private and then copy & paste the full S3 URL for that file location into the URL to file box in the episode and save it. As long as you have added your S3 credentials to your profile in Nanacast, our system will sense that you have added an S3 URL and will use your security credentials and our additional cloaking and security to create the secure URL. 

Every file you add will add a unique episode file URL tag to the additional tags, which you can expand and see below the standard tags for content pages. Use this tag in your HTML in place of the source URL to the file. Now that link is secure against being copied and shared to other users at other I.P. addresses, locations, etc.

Note: If your download file is a PDF, and if the client has Adobe Reader installed, depending on how you structure your link, the PDF could potentially open in browser with the S3 URL displayed. Our S3 integration creates a dynamic URL per individual client, with a limited time window of only a few minutes in which the file can be accessed by that specific URL. This makes link sharing ineffective even if a client were to notice and share the URL. However, if you want to prevent the link being displayed at all, putting the PDF file in a Zip file will eliminate that possibility.