After seeing a lot of posts where people end up posting the entire contents of dmesg, or Xorg.0.log, or their kernel .config files, I was thinking that an attachment feature could help make the forums more readable. Various problems / caveats I can see with it instantly though: * There should probably be a file size limit so people don't upload stupidly large files * It might be an idea to restrict it to text files, so people don't abuse it for the "Post your screenshot" threads * It might also be good to be able to revoke people's attachment privileges if they repeatedly abuse it somehow What do you think?
There a plenty of attachment mods out there. But I'm not really sure if we really want to add an attachment feature. Something like a gentoo-pastebin-service would be much better imho.
It might be useful for logs. We could limit it by size so that only small images can be posted. IMHO it would be better if the attachment could be only of type text, but I'm not very sure on how the sanity check would have to be. To tell the truth it's pretty annoying to have people posting pages and pages of logs. My 2 cents.
Wouldn't the scrollbars for code blocks [1] solve the same problem or am i missing some other useful feature the attachments would have to offer? [1] https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-341722.html
Well, one possible advantage would be that anyone who doesn't want to read the file doesn't have to wait for it to load. It could be an advantage for moderators splitting, or moving threads with huge config files in them, but to be honest, it probably isn't worth the hassle.
(In reply to comment #3) > Wouldn't the scrollbars for code blocks [1] solve the same problem or am i > missing some other useful feature the attachments would have to offer? > > [1] https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-341722.html > ++ attachements would just add unnecessary complexity when the current [code] blocks work. Using the overflow:auto style attribute to add scrollbars is the *standard* way to handle large blocks like this. I know we've discussed this before and a *small* group of loud users complaining about how the overflow:auto changes the mouse scrollwheel behaviour has stopped us from implementing it. The forum is a web application. There is a standards body that covers it, the w3c. The w3c says that the *standard* way of doing this is with overflow:auto. Why are we allowing this minority group of people to keep us from implementing this *standard*? Why are we discussing hacking the shit up out of the forums and possibly compromising security to add this attachement feature when all we have to do is add overflow:auto to the style sheet? There will *always* be a small vocal minority that is against change "No Matter What The Change Is". I vote that we tell them to get over it and implement the industry standard - overflow:auto on [code] blocks and forget this attachement sillyness. Just my .02 cents.
I just thought of something. When the xhmtl-1.0 strict upgrade is implemented (me and tomk are starting to work on it in three weeks), overflow:auto ***WILL*** be used. [code] blocks will get a height (an absolute value) and width (a percentage value so it flows with the size of the window) predefined and any text that doesn't fit in that predefined area will overflow with scrollbars. This will make the pages with huge [code] blocks shorter and no horizontal scrollbars on the bottom of the page. So this discussion about fixing the current forum implementation with an attachement feature is probably redundant. I'm marking this as "WONTFIX". Tom, if you decide to implement this in the meantime then feel free to reopen.
