Couple suggestions for the upload feature.

[UnOrthOdOx]

First of all, I love the upload feature. I use it constantly. However, mines an utter mess right now, tons of old files I would delete if I could, and a number I need to use that I can't because I can't FIND them half the time.

I tend to upload a LOT of pics when playing a demogame turn.

If I'm missing something, perhaps I'm just not all that skilled at this stuff. (no perhaps about it)

But, I think there's a couple things that would make the thing a lot easier:

• Some kind of organization of the files when you hit the view files. Maybe mine is just messed up, but they are neither chronological nor alphabetical, and appear completely random as all hell as far as I can tell.
• Allow multiple deletions at a time. Right now, we can only delete one file at a time. And, when you hit delete, it loads you back to the main upload page, then you got to hit the view files again, delete one more, IF YOU CAN FIND IT, rinse repeat.
• Allow us to stay in the view files when deleting files. Especially if we can't get the multiple deletions. Getting kicked back to the main upload page time and again is annoying.

Like I said, maybe I'm missing some critical blocks I need to check to make this happen? Maybe it just needs to be looked at.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

[Martin Gühmann]

Re: Couple suggestions for the upload feature.

Originally posted by UnOrthOdOx
I tend to upload a LOT of pics when playing a demogame turn.

How big are your pictures? If they are below 500000 bytes then I would attach them to a post. This way you don't need to delete them.

-Martin

[Krill]

they are often too large to do so, and you can;t change the size of most screenshots without losing detail which is very important.

[Locutus]

Yeah, it's a really cruddy hack, I've never been very happy with it as much as it serves a useful purpose. At some point we need to do either a major rewrite or better yet, replace it completely. Either option is far from trivial though and will take a fair bit of work. Right now we're focusing all our (limited) manpower on upgrading the forums and other much bigger changes, rather than chasing after the hundreds (if not thousands) of small things that are wrong with our current software (once we're on vB3 we can probably almost trivially add a hack that allows image attachments larger than 800x600 without screwing up the page layout on small screens, which would negate a big part of the need for upload space to begin with). If any of the things you requested were very easy to do I'd have been happy to help, but I'm afraid that's not the case (at least not as far as I can see).

What I can offer you in the meantime (provided not too many people want this so that it becomes a lot of work), is I can download the files for you directly from the server and offer them to you as a single zip file. That way you can download them and look at and/or re-organise them locally. If you want to you can then send a new zip back to me again and I'll replace your upload folder with whatever is in that zip (provided it abides to the usual rules of course).

Some kind of organization of the files when you hit the view files. Maybe mine is just messed up, but they are neither chronological nor alphabetical, and appear completely random as all hell as far as I can tell.

There's no such thing as random order when it comes to computers. Looking at my own files, it seems to order them by file size. The hack just uses the default OS sorting method and there's no easy way to change this I'm afraid.

[UnOrthOdOx]

Re: Re: Couple suggestions for the upload feature.

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann


How big are your pictures? If they are below 500000 bytes then I would attach them to a post. This way you don't need to delete them.

-Martin

Yeah, the pics are typically too large. I upload them then link the shrinked version to the turn threads. This allows members of the teams to click and see the full pic in full detail.

[UnOrthOdOx]

Originally posted by Locutus
Yeah, it's a really cruddy hack, I've never been very happy with it as much as it serves a useful purpose. At some point we need to do either a major rewrite or better yet, replace it completely. Either option is far from trivial though and will take a fair bit of work. Right now we're focusing all our (limited) manpower on upgrading the forums and other much bigger changes, rather than chasing after the hundreds (if not thousands) of small things that are wrong with our current software (once we're on vB3 we can probably almost trivially add a hack that allows image attachments larger than 800x600 without screwing up the page layout on small screens, which would negate a big part of the need for upload space to begin with). If any of the things you requested were very easy to do I'd have been happy to help, but I'm afraid that's not the case (at least not as far as I can see).

What I can offer you in the meantime (provided not too many people want this so that it becomes a lot of work), is I can download the files for you directly from the server and offer them to you as a single zip file. That way you can download them and look at and/or re-organise them locally. If you want to you can then send a new zip back to me again and I'll replace your upload folder with whatever is in that zip (provided it abides to the usual rules of course).



There's no such thing as random order when it comes to computers. Looking at my own files, it seems to order them by file size. The hack just uses the default OS sorting method and there's no easy way to change this I'm afraid.

I knew it couldn't be random, but mine are all so close to the same size, I had a hunch that might be the case but couldn't tell for sure.

I'm in the habit of having the upload page in one window and the forum in the other, immediately copy-paste the code to the forum as I upload, so it's not typically a problem. I just had a post get bounced and then deleted, and had to try to manually recover the screenshots since all the codes follow the same format.

At some point, I'm probably going to need some help cleaning the thing up, as I don't have time to manually delete them one by one. I wouldn't want to make a lot of work for you, but how hard would it be for you to do a complete wipe of my upload space? (not right now, just in theory at some point)

[Locutus]

It's not a lot of work for me at all, as long as you're the only one that wants this

Deleting your entire upload space is about the same amount of work, I can do that too if you want, although it'd be a shame if that caused a lot of dead links all over the forums...

[UnOrthOdOx]

Well, ye ole Jungle Gazette has been archived, and most editions actually deleted.

The Apolytonian is for a defunct game as well, possibly archived or deleted.

I've already manually deleted all the old Glory of News photos.

The only other thing I can think that would be impacted is the old turnthreads in the Merc forum. I gotta see just how much of that would be usefull in a game AAR situation.

[Locutus]

Well, just let me know me what you want. Deleting your attachments or zipping them up involves the same amount of work, I can do either.

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by Locutus
There's no such thing as random order when it comes to computers. Looking at my own files, it seems to order them by file size. The hack just uses the default OS sorting method and there's no easy way to change this I'm afraid.

There is always an easy way, and I had ten minutes this morning which I couldn't spend on anything else. There is now an option to sort by name, size or date. I also fixed the date so that it won't be the inode change time, but the data modification time. (All inodes were touched in January due to some attribute changes on the files.)

[Locutus]

I guess it depends on your definition of 'easy'

Pretty hacky implemention but that's true for the whole feature, sure as hell a whole lot better than it was before

[UnOrthOdOx]