Other Software > Developer's Corner
7 Reasons Not to Direct Link to a Developer's Download Files
app103:
How about both a direct download link and a link to the developer's/author's Website.
-PhilB66 (March 17, 2009, 12:54 AM)
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No, because most readers will just click the download link and it will have the same results, with regards to reasons 2 & 3.
justice:
Shouldn't be too hard to check the referer and direct to the download page if it's a direct link? Not sure how effective this system is though. Also the developer can create a startdownload page that meta refreshes to the download link - that way most people that copy the link won't copy the actual file but the page that starts it.
It's all about keeping control really for what is their responsibility. The reason I think most people direct link is because its more convenient then clicking 'download' then having to go through another webpage to find the 'actual download'. Pointing to a startdownload page however would overcome this.
tinjaw:
Justice said what I wanted to say. That is how I would handle things. Don't even have a direct link on your site. Have the link be to a script (CGI, PHP, whatever) that only serves up the file if clicked from your page.
app103:
It gets really complicated when you have download sites that are allowed to direct link because they are pulling in data from your PAD file. You can't really add just the download sites to a whitelist because in many cases you don't know all of them if you have your PAD file submitted to a PAD directory. Plus, even if you could whitelist them, that list could change daily.
The alternative is that you could do what you said for all other downloads, and have a separate file location just for those sites using your PAD file, but that could easily double the disk space needed to host your site if you end up needing to use 2 different copies of the file and that might not be possible for an author that has cheap or free hosting with a small disk space allowance or his web host only allows static html pages. (no cgi, php, or whatever)
Also, meta refresh may not work if the user has that disabled in his browser, and many do. Almost everyone I know on dialup has it disabled because it gets quite annoying on sites where you are trying to load a page and it keeps refreshing before the page is even halfway loaded.
app103:
My comment was finally posted on makeuseof, and received an official reply:
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