How to stop people downloading from my website

I am about to host a full game for reviewers to look at. How do I make sure that other people cant just look at the website with an FTP program and just download it for free?

You could always zip up the game and put a heavy password on it that'll make brute-force attempts useless, or make a specific portion of your website require a username/password to access a directory of files.
(as for how to do the latter, no clue, but I've seen it done before)

don't you have some way of making a directory private... or password restricted...


--Mike

Another completey different way is to make an installer which downloads the files from your site. Thus you don't have the whole thing on your site. The installer is si smal it can be sent by email. We use an installer from Lindersoft (www.lindersoft.com) for it and it works flawless.

First off, people can't look at your website with an FTP program without login information. Choosing an obscure filename and never linking to it from the web would prevent people from being able to download the file without knowing its exact name. Make sure your webserver isn't configured to display directory contents. Since people can easily share the secret URL with their friends, this is roughly as effective as...

Basic HTTP Authorization passwords were mentioned by Genexi2, above. These are the usernames and passwords that your browser will ask you for. Find out which webserver you're running - if it's apache, look up a tutorial on .htaccess and .htpasswd files; if it's IIS, ask your server admin. Login information can be traded just as easily as the location of a secret file, since (by default) servers will allow any number of people to login using the same login info at the same time.

A third option is to use a server-side application (such as Perl, PHP, or the like) to serve your file. This allows you to have the utmost control over who gets it. The program would verify the username and password inputted in a <form>, ensure no other instances of itself were already operating on behalf of that account, then start sending the file. When the last byte of the file is sent, record that that user account isn't allowed to download it again.

How about burning the game on CD and physically send it to them?

For programs like that, I use EXE Guarder

They don't even need an FTP program in some cases! That links to an insecure directory on my website and you should get a contents listing in your browser no problem - its parent is set up a litte better, with an index.html file of its own that redirects to the main site (try it). Give directories index pages to stop casual snooping - as Google can be directed to search individual sites I guess you would have to write a robots.txt file to keep important files behind a veil of secrecy.