Simple Machines Community Forum

Customizing SMF => Modifications and Packages => Mod Requests => Topic started by: mini-moof on July 24, 2018, 02:05:57 PM

Title: Is there an option for post to see
Post by: mini-moof on July 24, 2018, 02:05:57 PM
i spent many years running a forum on forumotion and built up a rather active forums without realising that forumotion didnt have any facilities to post to another forum host, so i had to start again and chose SMF ive slowly been copying parts over bit by bit but there was one thing i liked about the forumotion forum and that was the ability to hide links / attachments until a user replies to the topic and then they can download / view the link, is there anything like that within SMF 2.1 or 2.0 or any?
Title: Re: Is there an option for post to see
Post by: Kindred on July 24, 2018, 03:04:38 PM
there used to be a mod for it...   but I don't know if it was ever kept up to date.

That sort of behavior is one of those things that drives people away from sites..
Title: Re: Is there an option for post to see
Post by: Arantor on July 24, 2018, 03:11:06 PM
More specifically - if you have to reply to something before you can see it, the only thing you can possibly post is some generic reply that's just enough to be able to see it. How can you reply with something useful if you can't see what you're replying to?
Title: Re: Is there an option for post to see
Post by: GigaWatt on July 24, 2018, 05:01:08 PM
It's used on forums when you actually know what the attachment is, like a flash/EEPRPOM dump from some appliance or something similar.

Saying that, yes, I also dislike the function because all the comments in the thread are "thank you :)" or something similar ::).
Title: Re: Is there an option for post to see
Post by: Arantor on July 24, 2018, 05:16:14 PM
Doesn't really matter if you know what it is - how can you possibly comment on it if you can't actually see its content?
Title: Re: Is there an option for post to see
Post by: GigaWatt on July 24, 2018, 06:02:50 PM
The point is for the forum to let you download the attachment, that's all.

I've seen this on electronics repair forums... mostly Eastern European. Let's say you're a freelance repair technician. You don't get support from the manufacturer and even if you do, in most cases the service manual just says "replace motherboard" but the motherboard costs 70% of the price of the appliance ::)... not really viable if you'd like to stay in business, right ;). So, a common practice these days is to dump the software from the appliance, even if the customer's problem is not really related to the software in the appliance (almost everything runs on a single board computer nowadays), so that when somebody has a problem related to the firmware/software (not an uncommon thing these days, considering the size of the firmware/software and the tools used to make it), the service technician can just rewrite the flash/EEPROM chip which holds the "OS" for the appliance and job done :)... didn't have to buy a new motherboard and it didn't cost him/her a single component to finish the job ;).

In these cases, you know exactly what you're downloading. It's the firmware for the device described in the post (specs, board serial numbers, PCB versions, etc.), that's also on your workbench, so all you need to do is download the file. Unfortunately, you can't do this if you don't comment on the post ::). I've had to do this a few times myself and didn't really like the idea at all... as I said previously, all comments are variations of "thank you :)", "this really helped me :)", "god bless :)", etc., etc. ::).
Title: Re: Is there an option for post to see
Post by: Arantor on July 25, 2018, 02:37:25 AM
So you're validating my point: you end up typing something pointless that achieves nothing just to get the download.

It doesn't matter if you know what it is, you still can't type something useful in response.
Title: Re: Is there an option for post to see
Post by: mini-moof on July 25, 2018, 10:18:36 AM
Taken alot of this on board and i see alot of the valid points, i think the download system will be a better alternative with registered accounts only downloading