mtdev

making links absolute rather then relative

I've done the ini_set on my site, but it still seems to place the sessionid in the url for relative links -- say [a href="/page.php"], it will still change it even when I reset the trans_sid to false (before the session_start()).. So, I've made them absolute links and this seemed to resolve the issue..

Forget everything but htaccess

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
php_flag session.use_trans_sid off
</IfModule>
This page (and Martin Tsachev) saved my day, or rather my week.
I've been working pretty hard to get those damned sessionids out of the url.
The versions of PHP-environments I currently work in are 4.3.2 and 4.3.3. No matter what the manuals say, the ini_sets session.use_only_cookies and session.use_trans_sid have failed. And url_rewriter.tags simply disables session-starting at all.
Before these endeavours I spend some time contructing complicated sequences of header- and refresh-redirects, until I picked up that the session simply dies during a redirect (unless you write ?PHPSESSID=$PHPSESSID into the executing urls, obviously getting nowhere in the attempts to get rid of the sh..).
But the .htaccess-expression does the trick.
Hooray!

PHP session IDs and google

I finished developing my site before fully understanding the google-monster.
I was really worried about turning my SESSION IDs off in case my real customers had dropped sessions, or didn't have cookies enabled. So.... I am trying the following in an attempt to get google and the only other webcrawler on my site to have a good root round by turning the URL rewriter tags only for these user agents.
I've done this by checking the HTTP_USER_AGENT as follows BEFORE any session_start() command:
if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"google")!==false or strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"MSIECrawler")!==false)
{
ini_set("url_rewriter.tags","");
}
Hope this is of use to those folks stuck up the same tree I was,
Astronaut Pete
PS how about making the add comments box a bit bigger???!!

Turn this off in php altogether...

Find 'session.use_trans_sid' in your php.ini file and make sure it's set to 0, i.e. 'session.use_trans_sid = 0'. This is off by default in PHP Version 4.3.4, I don't know about other versions, sorry.

runtime control of trans_sid

Using
ini_set('session.use_trans_sid', false);
will NOT work if you are using PHP as a compiled-in module to Apache (and possibly other servers). BUT(!) Martin and Astronaut Pete are correct in suggesting
ini_set("url_rewriter.tags","");
because that is a RUNTIME modifiable string. This allows trans_sid to do its thing, but it doesn't have any "thing" to do.
Result: runtime control of trans_sid for people using complied in PHP modules.

YOU......................

............BEAUTY!!!!!!!!
I will recommend this page to everyone I know (who also has PHP session problems).

Session id

How can I pass a session ID to a page without using cookies?
I know that I can pass it through the URL, but how can I prevent other to see it in the URL?.

Session id in forms

I do want session ID to work in the members only section of my site, and want to pass the ID through an html form. I use ?session_name=session_ID. at the end of URLs, but what should I put in the Form?
Thanks

This is just not working for me...

I have this in the first lines of my php code:
//Session ID should not be added to URL's
ini_set('session.use_trans_sid', false);
ini_set("url_rewriter.tags","");
My .htaccess file is:
php_flag session.use_trans_sid off
IndexIgnore *
And it just doesn't work... At my home test server it does, but in the production server it doesn't...
Production server phpinfo: http://www.websitefacil.com/info.php

PHPSESSID and Google not a problem?

I don't think this is a problem any more with Google. Google doesn't show the sessid in their serps although the actual link still contains it. I came across many pages with decent PageRank which had a sessid. ref.: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=deskbar&q=inurl%...
The one think i'm unsure of is maybe the pages i looked at are doing something special that i don't know about..testing to see if the user is a googlebot, for example, AND another thing actually is i am not sure if it affects how deep google crawls their site. Someone could test that by running site: on a particular site and their running a link tester (w/ their permission) and comparing the total links from the link tester with google's site: value.

ini_set('session.use_trans_sid', false);

if my version is later than 4.2 will ini_set('session.use_trans_sid', false); actually change anything?

Thanks. Exactly what I needed! Worked like explained.

If you prefer to use url rewriting for your sessions, but wish to make your site search engine friendly, this code works well.

$br = get_browser();
if (!($br->crawler))
{
session_start();
... any session-related code
}

To use the function get_browser() you may need to get browscap.ini, which you can get from here: http://www.garykeith.com/browsers/downloads.asp .

I think it can be done with robot.txt

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*PHPSESSID

In Google sitemap BETA I can see 10 URLs restricted by robots.txt , and
that is with the above robot text. So i guess that might do the trick,
what do you think is this and indication that the above robot text is
egnoug?

I tried this solution in .htacess file
php_value session.use_only_cookies 1
php_value session.use_trans_sid 0

and not long after I had a coustomer complaining that my site no longer works.
what is the difference between php_value session.use_trans_sid and php_value session.use_only_cookies ? Will php_value session.use_trans_sid 0 disaple cookies all the time? and is that not problematic?