Question

There are three steps for user registration on my site and right now the urls for that are similar to:

http://www.example.com/register.php

http://www.example.com/registerstep2.php

http://www.example.com/registerstep3.php  

I was wondering what is an easy way to encode it to something like:

http://www.example.com/w^3434SD343f232gihmsdsdwre232

The reason I am trying to do this, is I am trying to ensure that users follow steps and don’t try to ‘trick’ the system by directly going to a registration link 3 for example.

Answer 1

This is a bad bad bad idea. Instead of trying to hide the url through simple obfuscation, do a check at the top of the script to see if they can proceed.

In other words, each time they go to a page, check to see if they submitted the previous page’s info. If they haven’t, send them back. Example:

if ( !functionThatChecksAndReturnsBool() )
{
    header("Location http://www.example.com/register.php");
    exit;
}