How can I replace the standard broken image placeholder .. ?
 

Well:

I want to set up a members area where the icons and the thumbs are not in a protected area.

The full sized images and video are in a protected area BUT they are on html, so, all I get is a broken image. (If they were not on html they would just redirect to the 403, but I need them on html due to some of the features).

What I want to do is replace the standard broken image http://ww345eerrttyygfr.com/img.jpg with an image that tells them why they are not seeing what they expected and what they need to do (log in or join).

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I know there are some gurus on this board.

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Using Mod Rewrite, it should be possible. I'm not an expert on it, but you can get some clues at:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/2783.htm

Yes, I may have to look into doing it with mod_rewrite, except for just thinking that over it sounds kind of like a hotlink redirect, but I can't do that because it's on the same domain, and logged in users need to be able to view them. ..

Maybe a creative .htaccess would work, if that's what you're using for the login method? Although, I'm not sure how .htaccess and mod_rewrite would work in combination. (I think you basically want to use the rewrite only if you get the "forbidden access" error type, and hopefully using one or the other would let you filter it in precisely that event)

No, I use a script that replaces Browser based Basic Access validation with a more secure version of user tracking and validation of its own. It's reading data from .htaccess and replacing Apache's Browser based Basic authentication.

This is going to be hard :(

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Are non-members loading the raw .gif or .jpg images? Or are they attempting to load a HTML page? If it's the latter, perhaps using some SSI or PHP code (i.e. if logged in, show aaaaa html code, else show bbbbbb html code) might do the trick?

It definetly is possible. I know SuicideGirls.com does it. But I have no idea how.

This would be nice to know...