Able to modify if and how PDF's are stored

  • We’ve had some problems with Google crawling the PDF’s – we have some data we do not want on the internet contained in those forms. Oddly, we only found 40 PDFs stored in the uploads folder – we’ve had hundreds of submissions over the last year. We only just found out about this and have deleted the files, but are dealing with the aftermath of someone finding the data on the web.

    Another thing that is odd, is all the PDF’s were time stamped on the same date on the server. April 28th of this year. We’ve had your extension inactivated for several months for other reasons – we’re not sure exactly when we deactivated it. Could this somehow have effected anything I’m describing? Can you think what might have caused this?

    Thanks for any light you can shine on this for us. I think we can safely say we just lost a client over this.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/gravity-forms-pdf-extended/

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  • Plugin Author Jake Jackson

    (@blue-liquid-designs)

    Gravity PDF protects any PDFs it generates and saved to disk using a .htaccess file to prevent direct access (including bots). However, this technique only works for Apache web servers. If your client was using an alternative web server like Nginx further steps would have needed to be taken to protect the files. I admit this information should be clearer in our documentation and I’ve made a note to have it corrected.

    The only time the plugin generates and saves PDFs to disk is when the documents are configured to be emailed via notifications, which may be why only a handful of PDFs where found in that folder – this feature might have been enabled for a short period of time.

    The current way we handle PDFs saved to disk has shortcomings and we are aiming to address all these problems in our v4.0 release (currently in beta).

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