Question: My company is about to move to Subversion and the initial plan was to put a large amount of archive material in the repo, as well as our current work. The idea was that no one would ever want to checkout the archive but would instead browse it via their web browser. 

We're concerned, however, that someone might accidentally checkout the whole archive (can't trust all of our users). Since our hosting agreement for the server has relatively low bandwidth limits, checking out the entire archive could blow the limit and cost us a lot of cash.

Is there anyway of providing read-only access to the archive via a web browser but prevent anyone from checking it out? I had a look at the available repository hooks and couldn't find anything useful. Any other ideas about how we could achieve our goal?

Answer: 
Have you checked out [ViewVC](http://www.viewvc.org/)? It can provide a nicely-formatted read-only view of your repo, and is quite configurable.
In the subversion contributions is a mod\_dontdothat that might do what you ask. It is an optional apache module that allows denying operations like a checkout on the root of the repository.