[jose luis]

Good day!

I need to divert unwanted traffic from countries that are 6 to 9 hours behind my local time. It amounts to about 40% of total traffic and is causing problems with the transfer capacity that at the moment I can afford to pay for. They also produce an excess of questions I frequently cannot attend.

I plan to divert this unwanted traffic to a simpler welcome (and excuses) page that would produce a very limited traffic compared with the standard site main page.

The redirection could be based on my local server real time and I would redirect traffic arriving between midnight and 7 AM.

I've checked with hotscripts.com but could not find something adequate. My hosting accept CGI (which I am starting to understand a little after struggling for a while with FormMail and Guestbook) and also PHP. But I know nothing (yet) of PHP. The hosting company is rather collaborative (though they would prefer I buy a transfer capacity extension) and the server is based on Linux

Also I am concerned whether this redirection would affect the spiders like googlebot and others and make me lose position in their rankings. Could I include a robot.txt to prevente this problem?

Could someone help with some free scripts?

Thanks a lot!

php all the way if you cannot use .htconfig

PHP Code:

 if (time() > starttime || time() < end time)
 {
 header ("location: pleaseleave.htm")
 } 

im not sure about the time() part but other wise that should work it may interfeer with spiders, but you could probaly use a broswer detectoin and say your a bot i'll let you in

[jose luis]

Thanks, Koncept. I'm a little ashamed for my big ignorance, but I prefer to ask and learn.

What do you refer to with .htconfig? Is it HTML, PHP, other thing I should request to my hosting?

regards,

[UnrealEd]

.htconfig is a document that you can place an your server yourself.in it you define the configuration of your website.

you also have .htaccess, .htpasswd those are for restrictions and secured logins on your webserver

Greetz,
UnrealEd

[jose luis]

I thank you all for your help. It nows seems simple to me and is working, but before your help it looked like a big problem.

However, there are a few details that other memebers who need this kind of redirection (and do not have much knowledge of PHP) should consider:

1. The code I used and does work is:

<?php
if(date("H")<8)
header("location: index_night.html")
?>

This will redirect visitors to a "night" main page, in my case with very few links, from 00.00 to 08.00 hrs.

2. It is very important to include this script as the very first thing in the normal index page (even before the document type declaration). Otherwise the redirection may not be possible.

3. Although it's obvious, I did not realize this in the first tests:

The main index should be renamed "index.php" instead of "index.html".

Regards.