Protection of some pages

Hiding URL of password protected pages

[R_A_Harris]

Hello, I'm new to these forums and fairly new to website building, so I hope this isn't too basic.

I am building a personal website and want some (nested) pages of family information only to be available through a password. I have a program to do this, but the URL of the protected page remains visible in the address bar:

..../family_pages/family_index.htm

By deleting the name of the last file, the content of the "family_pages" directory is displayed:

Index of /...../family_pages
Trees/
family_index.htm

and the user can go straight to the lower level pages, bypassing the protection.

There must be a straightforward way to avoid this and I assume I am doing something fairly stupid. Can somebody help please?

[piatkow]

I think I can guess what service you are using. Not sure if we can mention names here but would be surprised if it doesn't begin with B.

This does not provide real protection it just forces a password to be entered if a particular link is followed.

An easy step for the novice is to hide the "private" pages by using frames but in the medium term you need to get some real server side security on your own web host.

[adwatson]

Assuming you don't have the ability to create/use .htaccesss files, perhaps your best option would be to upload a file called "index.html" to the directory you want to prevent people seeing the contents of (family_pages) in this case. An empty file should work, as long it uses that name. Or you could have the file say something like "Access forbidden" or somesuch.