UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads 6 Version 6 Support Attachments.

Ok, I have recently moved my forum.

In all the hassle of moving files and such, I noticed a couple of problems caused by files that people had attached to their posts over time.

First I want to explain the problems because I think this is of interest to most people...

1st problem... Some of the files that were uploaded had unusual characters in the name. I am talking about ' and / and , etc.

Pretty much any character other than a letter, a number or the underline is basically an unusual character in a filename for windows/dos based systems.

The forum was on a unix based system. And I believe the files with unusual characters came from people with Mac computers.

The second problem I have absolutely no idea how it occured... Some of the attachment files had been copied... Saved, (which made them a smaller file size, and since they were jpegs to begin with and saved as jpegs again, the copies were much more "lossy" than the originals.) Given the jpg extension with small letters, and the original was left, but was given the JPG extension in capitals.

Again, I have absolutely no idea how this could have happened. It is NOT something that I or the other administrator did.

I do know that once again, there is no way that two files of identical filenames, one with capital letters in the extension, and one with small letters in the extension could have been present together in the same folder on a dos/windows based system. I have to figure the only way those files could even exist is because it was on a unix based system.

Ok, that is the two problems I found with the files in my attachments directory.

The problems I had were with the transfer of files. And with backups.

Any transfer of files kakked out on me when it came to any of the above files.

The server SQL was more than happy to make a backup of the entire forum, but when I tried to "restore" that backup on the other server, it kakked out. With no explanation as to why.

I was forced to make a minimal backup, restore that on the other server, then transfer files a little bit at a time. I also had to delete all the duplicate files, and rename those with unusual characters in their names.

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So, the problem is... people are able to upload files that contain unusual characters.

Is there any setting I can make that will disallow any uploads of files that contain anything other than letters, numbers and underlines ???

Barring that, what do I edit... and where... So that when people go to upload an attachment, they have to first read my message telling them not to upload anything with funky filenames ?

(I am pretty certain that the filenames with unusual characters in them were at the root of some fatal flaws we had when we first moved to Infopop's servers.)

Unfortunately we don't have anything that restricts those types of characters, but it is something we should look at. If you want to add a message, you can edit the newpost/newreply language files to change the text that states the user can upload an attachment to whatever you want it to read.

Thank you Rick. I will look for the files tonight and edit them.

Do you have any idea how the attachment files that were duplicated.... were duplicated ?

It pretty much had to happen on the server. I can't think of any way that that could have happened through the forum.

And I am positive that neither I, nor the one other person with direct access to our server account did that...

Unless..... Ok, I am going to have to look into one possibility. I wonder if it could happen if people upload the attachment, and then make the attached picture a directly viewable part of the post ?