Let’s say you have a website that you want users to be able to access online. How easy/stupid is it to deliver it by installing a WAMP server on the users machine, and then having the user access it off-line using their web browser. Is there a way to easily encrypt the content to make it difficult to simply copy it and upload to your own page?
What? You want them to both access it online and have an offline copy that they couldn’t copy…? Is that what you mean?
Couldn’t copy takes it too far. Obviously any content on a persons computer is available to be copied. I just mean, not stored in the way it is stored on the webpage, where a user could just FTP up the files and host it as their own webpage.
For example, if you wanted uses to be able to access the columns on the SDMB off-line. Assuming there is some php and what not involved, is it easy to just deliver a package that would install a WAMP server and then just have what is essentially a locally hosted webpage? Is there a way to do so in a way that a user couldn’t just FTP up some files and then have their own Straight Dope page?
if you want to have a vBulletin PHP script on WAMP that serves the equivalent of SDMB from a MySQL database you can do that. So if the user wanted to steal that, he would either copy the WAMP folder and the database itself to some other machine or else he would spider the website on his own machine just like people spider online websites.
ETA: detecting and punishing large scale spidering is obviously easier to do on your own server than on user’s personal machine 