Modern Vespa

My crack legal team (consisting of the firm Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe) have advised me that allowing attachments in an unmonitored environment -- namely, private messages -- is a liability. And I grudgingly must concur. Anything could be uploaded to MV’s servers, and we would never know it.

Effective immediately, attachments can no longer be added to private messages. If you need to exchange data with another MV member out of public view, I would encourage you to exchange email addresses via PM and then exchange data via email.

Furthermore, in about 60 days time, I am going to fire up a script that will delete ALL attachments in ALL private messages. During the next 60 days, I strongly encourage you to download any images or other attachments in private messages that you want to keep. After that, they will all be dispatched to the Great Bitbucket in the Sky.

The private messages themselves -- that is, the textual portion -- will be unaffected. And attachments are still active (and encouraged) in public-facing posts.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I don’t like removing functionality, but in this case the risk is more than I can stomach.

Thanks for the notice! There doesn't apparent to be a way to tell if a PM has an attachment, so I just went through every Sent, Received, and Saved PM from the past nearly 16 years. Shoulda done that long ago! I deleted the vast majority, while only finding one attachment. :shrug:

It was an interesting trip down memory lane, with some chuckles, sadness, and a few reminders I'd rather forget... Best one was one of the earliest where you sent the instructions on how to access my smorris@modernvespa.com email address. I clicked on the webmail link, and found the expected 404 error.

For PMs, the clippy icon is appended to the message title. We removed the icon from posts recently (there seemed little point in distinguishing posts with attachments vs ones without) but for PMs it remains. Hah! I forgot about that.

Weird, I don’t remember seeing it. But I was clicking through them pretty quick, so likely just missed it. I deleted that one, anyway. Thanks, I’ll remember that in the future. 😉

A slightly annoying, but honestly reasonable update, given how humans can (unfortunately) act these days.

Seriously, you are the most on-top-of-stuff admin I've ever encountered. In a good way, that is.

This, unfortunately. I’m trying to make up for literally years of neglect.

No more swapping photos of Vietnamese bodges then?

Nope, sorry. Unless it’s in a public post.

Jess,

I don’t see a toaster under your name.

Certainly being the “most on-top-of-stuff admin I’ve ever encountered” deserves one.

Bill

I’m very much opposed to awarding myself anything subjective. I gave in when OAD insisted I have a Cannonball award, but only because I objectively met the qualifications. Even then, I would be happier to have no awards under my name whatsoever.

I guess it’s a GenX thing.

The wrench clutched firmly in the grasp of his avatar should serve as his award, LOL

I think a gallery view of uploaded photos would be a great enhancement to the forum.
So you would be able to see all the photos uploaded on a timeline.

No, no ... He's right about the attachments, even on my 500X club Italia forum ( https://500x.forumfree.it ) i invite not to publish attachments in private messages even if, even if we can't see it, we administrators know it's there and delete it immediately. Same invitation to use emails to exchange them.

IMHO, perfectly reasonable, ya know 'cause people.

It’s on my list. Doing it well is a challenge, though. That’s probably why it hasn’t happened yet.

Perfect is the enemy of good, I guess.

Yeah, this seems like a brilliant idea considering how some folks could or might behave. You have to protect yourself and the site.

I mod on a University technical engineering site here in the UK, same rules exist there too. I have to say it's great to see the site undergoing this and other stuff and I definitely think you should award yourself a gold star of some kind jess. Thanks for everything you do.

I've always used better is the enemy of good enough but that makes sense as well. Perfect is an unobtainable goal. Even a 1955 Vespa 150 GS is not perfect. Still I'd be happy to own one.

This makes sense if the messages are stored locally and not monitored. Any time I've had a PM that gets to the point attachments are need I've just gone to email as it's way easier, quicker and likely more private not that it really mattered anyway.

An email more private? Are you that one guy that still uses PGP?

The key word is likely. For the most part I don't think Google or Microsoft have any interest in what I'm doing at all. Now if you are talking something like a criminal investigation then with the right forms filled out they will hand it over.

Now as far as packet sniffing, spoofing blah blah blah I try and not do dumb things.

I’m not making any claims or statements about privacy. This is about liability. I don’t really want unknown content on MV’s servers.

Are you going to send out an email informing users of this, which won't avoid the inevitable "where the hell are my PM attachments, you've stolen them and that was the only photo of yada yada yada" trickle of whinging from non regular users that will flow in for the next decade, but at least you can say "I told ya so piss off".

Nope.

On the other fora that I am a member, attachments on PM have never been allowed.
I am surprised that MV had the facility.
I won't miss it.

I always quote it as "Perfection is the enemy of excellence".

BTW, Jess, I think you at least deserve a participation award.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. Sometimes.

I used to be a moderator for a good sized Facebook group, and the attachments people would try to hide in the “Files” section would astound me. Doesn't seem like anybody here is that disgusting, but you never know what kind of newbie could crawl in under the radar (says the newest of the new), and cause no end of problems. Very wise call to make!!

I got no problems with that at all Jess. Cheers!

Starr! Good to see you around these parts. Hope you are well.

Thanks Jess! Life has been pretty much upside down since I saw you last. Savannah 2012, maybe? Let's just say I've been through the ringer and back. Still kicking, still alive. I check in every now and then, and was happy to see you back posting. I need to stay more in touch with the people and things I still love to do.

Yikes! Hope life is at least on the upswing. If there’s anything I (or we) can do, just say so.

+1

excellent idea.... I support the removal of the attachment function wholeheartedly. protect the site, protect the reputation , protect the members

How is this going to affect photos uploaded, but not attached directly to posts?

I found a hack that was useful for me when posting images to a thread, which fixed a bug that annoys me about attaching images in thread. I've only used it in two threads which i was posting lots of images within text that related to each image and needed more than a caption field could provide. Not sure how those images are or are not linked to those posts in the crm, or how you are going about deleting unattached images? Or just deleting attachments to pms only.

Basically my workaround that i found useful was for how attaching images to posts ends up with all the images at the end of the post text and the only way to have text right next to those attachments is the limited caption field.

Instead, i wanted it to be more like when you embed an image link into your actual post and are able to have full paragraphs between images included in the post.

My hack for that which i stumbled upon was to attach the image and upload it. When create post page reloads, i right click the image attachment link and copy image link, then embed that image link into the post body where needed using img bbcode tag. Then i delete the same image attachment from the post so that it doesn't show up duplicated at the end of the post. This way the image gets uploaded to mv, remains accessible forever, and gets the desired ui placement. But I'm guessing those images now show up in the crm admin as not attached to any post content and are probably orphan attachments.

Ideally those images won't get wiped with the pm attachment dump.

The two threads i used this hack on are here:
Smallframe Chassis Identification

Vespa Colors Thread

The PM changes won't directly affect that. However... You're right, that's a hack. As it turns out, that's a long-standing issue with the attachment code. When you upload something to a topic but then don't actually post it, the attachment gets stored on the server anyway (in AWS S3, actually) and then the forum completely loses track of it, effectively making the upload an orphan. It's not in the database at all at that point. It's just taking up space on S3.

I've recently built a script to compare the actual files on the server for each user to what is recorded in the database, in an attempt to gauge this particular problem. It's in the gigabytes. Maybe tens of gigabytes. Large enough that I'm concerned about it.

My intent is to delete all of those orphaned attachments, most of which I imagine were uploaded inadvertently (posts that were not actually posted, etc). I would be surprised if a lot of people were exploiting the hack you've described, though one user in particular (not you) has so many orphaned attachments, I have to wonder.

Ideally, the forum would support inline photo attachments. There are some obstacles to that (which I am slowly working through) and so it's unlikely that we will have that functionality soon. In the meantime, I would suggest that a better approach is to attach the photos to a post and then also inline those photos with image tags. That way, the attachment doesn't get orphaned, we know which attachment goes with which post, and the only down side is that the photo appears twice -- once where you inline it, and once at the end of the post.

For short posts, I would suggest that all of this is completely unnecessary -- a photo slightly below the text is not much of a burden on readers. For longer posts, such as a build thread, I can see where you would want to support inline photos. But even then, we don't support resizing an image or text wrapping or anything like that, so "inline" will still mean edge to edge photo in most circumstances.

I would strongly suggest you go back and re-upload those photos properly on past posts, because the orphaned ones are going to be deleted for sure.

On that subject - another inefficiency is that a user can't find their own images on the database, so if an image might 'want' to be repeated (say, the U-bolt clutch holder which I've posted several times) then it has to be uploaded afresh each time.

If one could see into the future, one might save such image URLs in Notes, but that takes a degree of clairvoyance...

Hi Jim - it's an awkward extra step, but I sometimes achieve this by finding a previous post with the image, right clicking on it, and "Copy Image Link" (in Firefox, anyways). This then gives a link you can paste into img tags in your reply.

I suppose you could save common image links in Notes, but I've never tried.

Testing below to make sure ( image from: Found in Driveway )

Life's too short to hunt down old posted images - at least for me.

There are two obstacles to that: 1) Such a gallery would require a user interface, which does not exist at the moment. 2) Such a gallery would require thumbnail images, and none of the uploads are currently thumbnailed.

Additionally, while it's easy to associate one upload with multiple posts just by linking to it, doing so presents some subtler problems. For one, unless there is an actual database record of where each attachment is being used, it's difficult to determine whether an image is critical to the thread that it appears in or multiple threads. This becomes especially relevant when, after giving everyone a gallery of their uploads, they ask to delete uploads, which then would start impacting potentially many different threads.

It's kind of a nightmare. And I will almost certainly have to write it from scratch. Just a SMoP, right?

When an image is uploaded and before it's posted, why can't we see the HTML code for it? If the HTML is visible, you could drag and drop it wherever you want in the post. The size could stay the same and it would be where it best suited the poster.

Because it was written as an add-on to phpBB circa 2005. It is primitive. And truthfully, pretty terrible code.

You can actually see the image if you do a preview, though.