Legacy New user remarks/issues

[Gladius]

This is probably going to be part issue/usability/how-do-I thread so bear with me.

• First thing I noticed is that the version number is 1.3.4 instead of .6 for my vB version, probably wrong?
• Secondly, is there actually no documentation at all?
• Thirdly, first thing I'm blinded by in the settings is the unreadable bright red warnings in all the warnings in Manage Settings and elsewhere... argh, this might look OK for the colourblind, but it's unreadable for me on the regular blue ACP background. PLEASE change this...

Next:

Path To Downloads - there's no explanation what the path should be, relative to or not, why is it not a "valid value"... the error popup "There are errors in the settings on this page." is really quite useless.

For instance, I've set my path to ./vb_dl which is the same format that I use with the attachment storage, but it's telling me it's not "valid". What the heck?

Edit: Nevermind, figured out I need to manually create the dir and chmod it 777. On top of that, the path must be FULL and not relative. All of this REALLY needs to be in the help...

Edit:

Extensions - [Add New Extension] [Add Extension Group] links are white text on bright grey background - unreadable. I spent quite some time looking around for them before I spotted them. Same thing with Categories.

Feature request: please add an enable/disable option for each extension... right now during testing I don't want all of them to be available but the only way to disable them seems to be to delete them. That's really not ideal as I'd have to redo all of them and reset all their settings if I wanted to enable them again.

Edit: Modules... I'm guessing what I'm doing here as there's no description on... anything. I also have no idea what each of these modules does exactly so I've got no idea what I'm enabling or disabling. Sure, I can do a good guess based on the names but, uh...?

What does the "Global" module do exactly and what does granting one usergroup access to it do?

 

[Gladius]

I was talking about decompiling their files before I actually checked who the author of the uploader script was... if it's open source, the entire source should be available and editable, no?

And yea, I know it's a PITA working after someone else, I'm not blaming you or anything, it's just that I'm really frustrated with the amount of attention needed to get all this up and running to a degree that I'm going to be satisfied with (and wait for who knows how long for a big batch of badly needed features that yet have to be coded). I'm pointing out a lot of things here because I know that my users will do so to me as well and I've learned over the years to minimize complaints from users by making damn sure in advance that what I present them with has as few obvious problems/issues as possible. And naturally, the features that I miss make it that much harder/impossible for me to do what I want. Just like everyone else using vBDownloads.

Such as it is, I wouldn't really miss the Flash uploader. I think it'd look and feel better if you just improved on the regular one like I suggested.

If the 5/20MB is the only issue here, then that's not really worth bothering with. I'll just set them to match.

 

[Dylan]

It should might but I can't find it anywhere. Depending on the license, open source could mean different things. That's why my first question when thinking about adding in an open source part is, Cosmic, can we use this?

I'm frustrated as well, I don't like saying I can't do something. I'm just not a flash developer and I don't know how it's internal workings operate.

I'll keep looking to see if I can find some reference somewhere that tells how you can modify the colors/text of the queue.

 

[Gladius]

Cool, thanks.

Edit: another small issue to fix, on profile pages, the text "This user has no downloads... " has no padding set all around it like all the other text. E.g. the text "<username> has not received any visitor messages." has proper padding.

 

[Dylan]

Cool, thanks.

Edit: another small issue to fix, on profile pages, the text "This user has no downloads... " has no padding set all around it like all the other text. E.g. the text "<username> has not received any visitor messages." has proper padding.

I just fixed this on your site and in the next bugfix release

 

[Gladius]

Thanks, though it seems the padding above the text is twice as much as around and below?

 

[Dylan]

I used the same code as if it was a row of a download entry

 

[Gladius]

The profiles that do have any downloads listed look fine, there's no double padding on top there... this is only visible with those with no entries. So something is different there...

 

[Dylan]

Ah, found the problem and fixed it

 

[Gladius]

OK, right now I think this is my biggest remaining issue at the moment:

Another big issue with permissions is the View/Upload/Download permissions that need to be set with every new category... this is needlessly tedious as it needs to be redone and everything manually rechecked for every single category I want to add... if there was an option to set defaults for every new category and to mass edit it across all the categories this would be infinitely faster and more user-friendly.

The same thing that bugged me about the permissions that I mentioned before is present here as well... if I enable Unregistered and Registered Users to have access to View for instance, why doesn't this include everyone, including mods, admins, super mods, etc. considering that they all have Registered users as the primary user group? Basically, if a user belongs to more than one user group, if any of those user groups is allowed, the user should have permissions to view, download or upload. This does not seem to be the case right now.

As I've got about 25 categories and 50-100 subcategories to set up, doing it the way it is now would take forever to get all the permissions in place for each of them. Dylan, is what I listed in my last paragraph actually a bug?

 

[Dylan]

ah, didn't fully get that end part. Yes, if they are a member of registered users, either primary or secondary, and that's selected, they should have visibility, regardless of their other groups. I'll check into that code and test it out locally.

 

[Gladius]

Any updates on this yet?

 

[Dylan]

Sorry about that, I just did a hotfix on the files which should fix the problem. Just download the package again and upload the new files. You don't have to install the product xml. Let me know if that fixes the usergroup problem.

 

[Gladius]

Hm... I tried uploading in the "Temporary Uploads" category and when I clicked the Upload button nothing happened. Tried several times afterwards and same thing - nothing. I did not fill in any description text, but I got no warning about it.

Also, the text editor seems to have disappeared, there's just a text entry field now.

I tried again after adding some text, but the upload button didn't seem to trigger anything any more.

 

[Dylan]

Sorry, I was testing with the quick reply and left it coded in there. I fixed the files on your server back to the full editor and it's working for me. Let me know if it's still not working for you and if the permissions are working right. It should work correctly no matter what usergroup the user has set as their primary or secondary.

 

[Gladius]

Yup, seems to be working now, thanks! Btw, that first blank character is still there in the editor.

Now for the most pressing issue - could you add a feature to set default permissions for all newly created categories or to mass change permissions? This would cut down on the time necessary to set up a large number of categories immensely.

If not, could you tell me where I can change the current template to make "View" and "Download" available to Registered and Unregistered / Not Logged In and "Upload" to Registered selected by default?

 

[Dylan]

I just hard coded it into your add category file, next feature update I was planning on having defaults set for new categories.

The reason there is a space is because the editor requires at least 1 character to be filled out. Normally you'd get an error and the page wouldn't move, but with the flash uploader it acts a bit funky and forward to the next page and doesn't quite finish the file right. So I think David put the empty character in there to make sure it had something in the description.

 

[Gladius]

Thanks, I'll check it out.