[users@httpd] Referring pages using apache + cgi scripts

[William Turrell <wt...@clara.co.uk>]

I am currently attempting to use the referring page environment variable
within a CGI script to verify that a user has come from another page on the
same server before allowing them to access another one.

Page one presents users with a menu, each of which refers to the second CGI
script but with different parameters.  I only want them to be able to access
page two if they have specifically gone to page one first, and I don't want
them to be able to cut + paste the URL of page two in another browser.  For
reasons I won't go into we don't want to use normal .htpasswd/.htaccess or
mod_auth_db for any of this.

(perl code)
my $q = new CGI;
my $referer = $q->referer() || "";

98-9% of the time it works, but for a few users it doesn't - their referral
page is blank in both the apache logfile and a logfile I'm generating from
the second CGI script.  I can also verify that in all cases they definitely
did go to the first page by looking back a few seconds.

Any reason why this information wouldn't be being passed on? The people
we've asked seem to have modern browsers (IE 5 or 6) and operating systems
(WinNT etc.), and I assumed that referral information was mandatory anyway.
Is there a solution?

Thanks for your help,

William


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