Stop people from entering my forums directly - I want them to view homepage 1st

[Meirion]

A lot of my visitors are bookmarking the URL for my forums and going straight there instead of coming through the index of my site.

There's information on the site that I'd like them to see, and would like to know how (through cookies or soemthing?) I can make their first visit to the message board each day forward them to /index.html?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Meza.

[Mike Gaidin]

I'd be interested in this as well.

[Meirion]

Righto, was thinking about this earlier.

Could this be possible:

have a javascript on the front page that sets a 1 day expiring cookie.

Each time the main forum page is loaded if, either:

- The coookie does not exist
- The cookie has expired

then the broswer is forwarded to http://www.site.com/index.html

But if the cookie is valid then they stay on that page.

I'm sure this would work! But don't quite know how to implement it

Can anyone help?

[Sinecure]

hmm, this is a good idea although your users will get sick of it pretty fast I would suggest also adding an option in the "usercp>edit profile" page where the user could choose to select yes/no to this option.

Just an idea, because you could potentially lose users by doing this.

[Meirion]

Hmmm, well possibly. I don't think it's too much to ask for them to view the front page of my site once a day when they first log on.

I mean that is actually where all my work goes on the site, making the content for it - half my members forget to ever see it!

Would require a proper bit of PHP hacking to put an option in the CP too. I was thinking it could maybe all be done in templates.

In this case then maybe you could do it another way - where by when you update the main site you push a button in the CP which will log the date&time. Next time someone logs in you could compare their last login with the the last upload time stored and decide whether to forward them or not.

Brain cogs turning....