Attachments Suspension

[La Reine Margot]

I just deleted three pictures from way, way back. I'll wait to hear any reactions to my action. The post is there, but the pictures are gone and they are gone forever. Kaput. Done.

Will anyone miss them? Will anyone notice?

I sit and wait.

[La Reine Margot]

Three more are gone. But I have a back up for those three.
Now. What if some pictures are deleted from the Forum but kept in an archive for further use, if it becomes necessary.

One way of dealing with the problem would be to delete all the attached pictures from 2021, a year later all those attached in 2022.... and so on.

But someone has to do it and that's a job. If I get myself a minion willing to work for very little to do just that... maybe. But that's a discussion for another day.

[cluseb]

Aa, a couple of questions Miss Margo. Just what does this place do?

download - 2023-02-26T232557.971 temp.JPG (37.48 KiB) Viewed 4220 times

And, any job openings doing what he's doing?

[Frank]

Isn't there an option within your CMS to simply delete "all images from 2021" or something like that in one go ? I'd assume it must exist.

[La Reine Margot]

Isn't there an option within your CMS to simply delete "all images from 2021" or something like that in one go ? I'd assume it must exist.

We can delete a bunch of files at once, like if we selected all files from 2021, but that would delete not only the pictures, but the posts as well and that would include posts with linked images.

If we want to keep the attached images in storage we have to first back them up, which means we have to go to each individual attachment.

We can take a bit of time each day to do that and when I said I would need a minion, I meant someone in our crew who will have full access to the system itself. There are very few of us that have that kind of control.

Still, we're looking to upgrade the site and to set some limitations as far as attachments. But deleting very old pictures is not a bad idea.

[Edukator]

"Deleting very old pictures is not a bad idea"... it's the ONLY way to solve this (recurring) issue. It has been suggested many times in the past and it's the less harmful option, all forum members agree with this. It would be much better than putting limitations on new posts and other restrictive rules. It's hard to believe this process can't be automated by a competent programmer writing a few codes, doing it manually is very time consuming and obviously out of question.
Hopefully you'll find some way doing it.

[SilentHunter]

In the German phpBB.de Forum are several scripts to delete "something". One example delete all threads that are older than zzz days and have no answers since then.

I think you will find also a English Forum with such tools.

[La Reine Margot]

In the German phpBB.de Forum are several scripts to delete "something". One example delete all threads that are older than zzz days and have no answers since then.

I think you will find also a English Forum with such tools.

We can delete anything we want, threads, posts, pictures. We could delete all the threads that are old and inactive at once, that's not the problem. Some people might argue that old posts have some value, even if inactive, some might say that they should all go to make room for the new. All valid arguments.

When we had the problem before people were asking for all the posts and pictures that had been posted to be recovered. Before we could even start recovering all those old posts, we had a lot more new posts than ever.

Attached images are what use a lot of space, not the posts or threads, so deleting old attachments once in a while, could free up some space. That's one of the solutions we're considering.

[Edukator]

It would be nice to keep and archive everything forever... but you can't have unlimited storage space whatever plans you subscribe to and it will be more and more expensive as the forum grows up, sooner or later the problem will resurface again.
You can't please everybody and at some point a choice must be made and (IMO) deleting (very) old posts attachements in inactive threads is the less harmful option for most members. Maybe it's not valid for all forums but in the O.D forum (where most "heavy" attachements are posted) it's extremely rare to see a "dead"/sleeping topic/thread reactivated after many years, most active threads are less than 2 years old, very often much less.

[cluseb]

Minion at work

I've started moving my more benign picks ( I have a lot with trucks, trains and clothed girls not in peril ) to "postimages.org". It's slow because I have to run around replacing the links everywhere I used the " [img]" feature , but it could be as much as a 100 meg.