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JDNelson1Community Advisor
Community Advisor
May 20, 2015
Question

Gated Asset - Form Fill with List of OK

  • May 20, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 1327 views

I need a TRULY gated asset.  I don't want to just require a form-fill before sending someone to another un-gated page. 

My thought was to use the Known Visitor part of a form to display my asset, but that's not quite enough for me.  Just because they are in my database, or fill out my form, isn't secure enough (really it just tells me who they claimed to be and let's them in). I want to be able to build a list of email addresses that are allowed to view it, then have the form submission bounce off that list and provide the content, or an error message (or another page altogether).

Requesting email address and then sending them the link, while confirming it is who they are and who is allowed, adds too much dimension (and clicks), and ultimately would send them back to another un-gated page.


Can anyone point me in the right direction?

1 reply

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
May 20, 2015

You're pushing up against the limits of forms here, because the form's onSuccess event is not dependent on the Mkto database  That is, the Thank You URL (which can be your gated asset) can't be validated on the server side before being sent back.  You can do a lot to manipulate it on the client side using JS, but anyone who views your page source can see what you're doing.  So while you can enrich the feature set a lot, you can't magically introduce real security.

I can think of 2 options offhand

  1. Set the Thank You URL to an LP with segmentations. Allowed users segment gets redirected to the asset automatically.  All other users get a static page with "Nice try."
  2. Set up an LP with an impossible to guess URL (like a 32-bit GUID). Set up URL aliases only for the allowed email addresses (pages.example.com/my.pdf-jdnelson@example2.com -> pages.example.com/my.pdf-3393bdea-94e0-4cdc-b6ba-54f02b93b424.html).  Then append the email address to the Thank You URL when redirecting the user onSuccess.

EDIT: This stupid "rich text" editor insists on hyperlinking my dummy URLs.  I'm not in the mood to fight with it but I think you get the idea.

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
May 20, 2015

Make sure your thank you page set Meta Robots to noindex,nofollow and your Gate page has index,nofollow...or even noindex,nofollow if you want to reduce random people finding it.

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
May 20, 2015

Yes, do what Josh Hill​ said as well (if you use option [2]).

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