Forms Authentication not working for specific page

Question

I cannot seem to isolate my forums to set different permissions for them than the rest of the site.

Here is the setup for my site.

<location path=".">
  <system.web>
    <authentication mode="None" />
  </system.web>
</location>

I need to isolate my forums. At the moment, for testing purposes, I have it setup so that all users are denied access.

<location path="~/public/public-forum.aspx">
  <system.web>
    <authentication mode="Forms">
      <forms loginUrl="public/login.aspx" />
    </authentication>
    <authorization>
      <deny users="*" />
    </authorization>
  </system.web>
</location>

What I'm finding is that I can still access the forum page. This suggests to me that this isn't setup correctly.

Does the path attribute have to be relative? Does it have to point to the URL that the page is accessed through or the rewritten path? ~/public/public-forum.aspx is a virtual path that is rewritten so neither the directly nor the file exists with those names. Why does this currently not work?

I hope that's enough detail for a solution.

Answer 1

edit2: So the solution isn't only in the comments :
As far as i know you cannot specify an authenticationmode per location.
You could set the forms authentication mode throughout your site and only require logged in users in the secure parts.

edit:
mmmh strange , are you sure you only edited the ~ away?
They discuss your problem here but i can't imagine how changing the ~ would trigger it.
Could you perhaps post your entire web.config?
Also : are you using iis 6 and virtual directories?

The ~ sign is not needed , try this :

<location path="public/public-forum.aspx">
  <system.web>
    <authentication mode="Forms">
      <forms loginUrl="public/login.aspx" />
    </authentication>
    <authorization>
      <deny users="*" />
    </authorization>
  </system.web>
</location>