WP Folio Team

Hi @aasemoon,

Thank you for your feedback. We really appreciate it.

While it’s true that you can use htaccess rules to protect files, our PDA plugins offers much more features including the following advantages:

– Better performance – only protected files run through our scripts. As a result, our plugin will slow down your site’s performance compared to the normal htaccess rules
– Friendly UI to manage each file protection status
– Private download links that allow file sharing with certain groups of users
– Ease of use – protect individual files with a single click; multiple files via Bulk Actions
– Different permissions – set different file access permission for each file

Our PDA Lite/Free version does provide the same file protection method and UI as the Gold version.

It does exactly what we have advertised and described on WordPress. You only need our PDA Gold when you want more advanced features and unlimited files protection.

Anyway, can you please drop us an email to hello(at)preventdirectaccess.com with your use case?

We’ll see what we can do to help you.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for your information, @warlok2014.

I believe you’re referring to our Folder Protection documentation.

As mentioned clearly on top of the tutorial, it is an extended feature, and so, requires both our PDA Gold & Access Restriction extension.

Requirements:
– PDA Access Restriction version 1.0.4 or greater
– Prevent Direct Access Gold version 3.0.25.4 or greater

Also, our PDA Gold is all about file protection, so you can’t really “password protect” entire folders.

Anyway, can you please CC our hello@buildwps.com as well just in case?

Elena.

Hello @akshay01,

Thanks for your reply.

Just to clarify:

1. Our Lite version only allows the file’s author to access protected files directly while our Gold lets you set the file access permission to specific user roles.

2. As for video protection, our PDA Gold prevents unwanted users from direct access to your protected files, allowing only admins & certain roles to view.

3. If you want to protect your videos against downloads as well, you’d need both PDA Gold and its video extension.

It’s worth noting that although there is no sure way to protect your videos against all programs and video downloaders, our method will make it harder for most average people to steal your valuable videos.

Please can refer to this comparison between the main features of our PDA Gold and its Protect WordPress Video extension for more information.

Let us know if it makes sense to you.

Hi @akshay01,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

May I know how you protect your files?

It looks like the file hasn’t been protected yet. Technically, when a file is protected by our plugin, the file URL should become something like https://yourwebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/_pda/2020/10/Final-RCC-Pipes.mp4.

Please refer to this doc on how to protect media files with PDA Free.

Regarding to preventing videos from downloads, take a look at demo page (http://demo.bwps.us/streaming-videos/). You will need our Prevent Direct Access – PDA Gold and Video Protection extension to achieve that.

Please let us know if it makes sense to you.

Hi @reinaldudras,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

If you’re using a CDN, what you need to do is to exclude our protected folder (_pda) from the CDN caching.

That’s all you have to do.

Please refer to this guide on how to exclude our _pda folder on Cloudflare.

Please let us know if it makes sense to you.

What CDN are you using, by the way?