vBulletin Mods

Limit Attachment Downloads 1.3

The writing of this hack was sponsored by: sama3y.net

About this hack:
This hack allows you to limit the number of attachments users can download during a given time period.

This hack is pretty flexible right now. You can choose how many attachments a user can download in a give time. That given time can be set to an hour, a day, a week, a month, 3 months, 6 months, or a year. You also set which attachment types get counted for this hack. Also, you set which usergroups get affected by this hack and how many downloads each usergoup can make.

If a user tries downloading past their limit, they will get an error message. This error message includes when they will be able to start downloading again.

Also, there is a cron job to remove from the table that this hack creates, all the rows that are past the limit date so your table doesn't grow forever and saves you space.

• Files edited: 0
• Templates edited: 0
• Files to upload: 2 (1 via ACP, 1 via FTP)
• Time to install: 1 minute

Updates:
Version 1.0 (7/19/07):

• First Release of this Hack

Version 1.1 (7/19/07):

• [FIXED] MAJOR BUG, the main table needed was not being installed, causing database errors.
• [CHANGED] I moved over the attachment limit to the usergroup settings to give an option of different download amounts per usergroup.

Version 1.2 (7/19/07):

• [FIXED] I REALLY now fixed the MAJOR BUG, the main table needed was not being installed, causing database errors.

Version 1.3 (7/29/07):

• [ADDED] I added a lot more options to 'Download Limit Time Frame' option.
• [CHANGED] Thumbnails are not counted as download attachments.

Pictures:

• The error message.
• Found in the main vb settings
• Found in the attachment types setting
• Found in the usergroup settings

first post ... nice mod ... *installed*

cool hack, thank you :)

[edit] doesn´t work with 3.6.5 :(

This is something that heaps of people have been wanting for ever! very nice work.
Will install it on my site very soon.

I have some ideas for extra features, if your interested in expanding it, let me know.

thanks.

Hi
Great idea, i will take a look at it tonight Abe1, thanks :)
Perhaps 1 post could reset the limit?
Also, would this work with Downloads II or, could you make this work with it please Abe1?

don't work
database error when downloading of a group subjected to this hack

Can you post the error message?
What doesn't work?

Version 1.1 (7/19/07):

• [FIXED] MAJOR BUG, the main table needed was not being installed, causing database errors.
• [CHANGED] I moved over the attachment limit to the usergroup settings to give an option of different download amounts per usergroup.

Upload BOTH files again.

install the 2 end version
member can download 1 st file
the second file give database error

uploaded new files, deinstalled old hack and installed new one, controlled settings but still doesn´t work.

Block Disabled:      (Update License Status)
Suspended or Unlicensed Members Cannot View Code.

Can you uninstall then re-install?

that´s what i meant with deinstalling and installing the new one.

Any way I can check you ACP?

Awesome! Now i dont need to use the points to download attachments for our members =]

you´ve got a pm :cool:

thank you, works great now :)

Great work mate. Is it possible, i still havent installed so i dont know, to limit it per forum?

No. It is only done on a usergroup level.

If a user reaches their limit, will they still be able to see the thumbnails of attachment images or will they not be displayed ?

This mod would suit my site fantastically but I would still need users to be able to see thumbnails when they have reached their limit.

Installed and working.
Great work.
thanks.

I think it can be done, in my site i have a download subforum, and per usergoups i deny the downloads. on all other subforums downloads are enable.

In my site works
I didn't enabled the plugin for "jpg, gif, png and psd files" and enabled it for .dwg, .3ds, .rar, .zip, etc.
When a user uploads a new attachment in (dwg, 3ds, rar, etc) i create a thumb so user sees what they are downloading.

This was easier than I thought. For everyone else who wants this feature :

ACP -> Products & Plugins -> Plugin Manager -> Edit attachment_display thus :

Block Disabled:      (Update License Status)
Suspended or Unlicensed Members Cannot View Code.

Save.

Version 1.3 (7/29/07):

• [ADDED] I added a lot more options to 'Download Limit Time Frame' option.
• [CHANGED] Thumbnails are not counted as download attachments.

Just re-upload the product XML file.

The product download is for 1.2 yet the latest version is 1.3 ???

Sorry, forgot to change the file. Check now.

Some of my suggestions for a future update:
1. Any chance to add captcha to the attachments as an option?
2. If users go over allowed attachments, add a count down timer, that they will have to wait before they can download.

These 2 options would be mod of the month for sure!

Very good concept :p

Not sure what you mean. How would this help this hack.This is a feature already! If you try to download an attachment after you used your time already, then it tells you how much time you have left. (look at the first image in the main post)

this is quite good but how about if a user uploads an attachment in a specific forum then their attachment limit goes up by 1

This would encourage people to just not download attachments but also to upload stuff which is relevant to the site in question.

If a user uploads an attachment, then they get an extra download?

yep because this hack limits them to how many per day/month etc but no incentive to try boost their limit back up.
Not sure if u can pull it off but cheers for hack Abe1

1. I have 90 00 members on my site, I had a thread created 4 days ago which had a 1.9 meg attachment in it. within 4 days, 30 000 people have downloaded it, that is almost 60GB of bandwidth! I doubt those downloads were unique!

People can login create a bot, and then have that bot keep downloading that attachment to waste bandwidth. Having a catpcha image, would make the bot useless.

Not everyone may want this, but at least having the option in the admincp to turn it on/off would be great! as I would use it for sure!

2. I mean like rapidshare, if they go over then the countdown timer starts exactly like rapidshare, with ajax, so they dont have to refresh etc.

thanks.

Thanks...nice mod ...

But now I'm have a simple problem...

Group "Unregistered / Not Logged In" don't have "Limit Attachment Downloads" and "Download Attachment Limit" parameters :confused:

This would be a totally separate hack.
I dont think I'll add it.

K, but it would be really cool to have it all in one, with options to turn certain things on/off

You do.

was referring to the extra features I mentioned above :) would be cool to have those built in :)

hello ,
if you can add a small feature for it make it limited by IP not by the username , because he can have other username directly and contine downloading , also if you can add speed limit feature it's will be too much nice ,
I really like you hack .
Thanks ,
Zi5

thank you SOOOO much :D

Yeah I'm having this same issue.

Thanks a lot! I was looking forward for it ^^

I know this mod is said to be for 3.6.8, but I seriously don't plan on upgrading my 3.6.7PL board at this point. If there aren't much datebase and table changes between the 2 versions, this mod should still work for 3.6.7PL right?


EDITED:
Yes, it works for 3.6.7PL. Thank you very much for this wonderful mod.

Hey! Just want to make a board free of Limit Download is it possible?

it bugged my vbtt :/ had to uninstall

where in phrase can i change the wording when they reach the certain amount of downloads, i want to add few things

-pb

Weird , I can install this but I can't seem to find the attachment limit setting like http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/attac...3&d=1184847662


this will be great when I get this working ,, Total

yea i had the same problem try to unistall it and install it again that helped for me

Uninstalled -- then re-installed still not working .. :(

you checked under usergroup? thats where you have to go to config and then go under attachment and chose which attachments you want to limit

I did not check under usergroup , thanks so much ... Working now , Total

lol no proms now waiting for my help...lmao

I am having same issues, but I am guessing this hack is for registered users only. Seems a little ridiculous to try and put a time limit on a guest when you have so many of them visiting your board and no way of controlling who has or has not downloaded a file from your board. :(
Might be a nice feature if this hack had a way to record IPs from guest and maybe allow limited downloads by their address.

I installed it, but it showing me only one option like the time beetween two attechment.

what abt attechment size and everything , can i control that too or only time.

Did you upload the file to your ftp?

would be nice Abe1 to integrate in to the Project Tools, I'm looking yet to integrate it to my project tools downloads cos it is working fine on the forum but I'm sure thats a small update for project tools, any idea dude?

Thanks so much. /installed

Hello Abe1
is your add-one can limit / denied using of download accelerator like program? (the programs using multi-part downloading .. that open 5-10 connection to download the same file? ..)
or is there some hack can do this ?? (limit the connection during the download of file with ONE just ..)

Hi,

Im looking for a hack to let me show the thumbnails to the unregistered users, but dont let they download the attachment (or limit the download) if they dont register and log in.

This hack can help me with that?

Thanks...

hey abe1,

i ran into a problem and received a much of pm's from my members

well basically members that never downloaded any attachments received a message that they will have to wait x amount of time and a members forwarded the message and found that the dates if off wacked.

sample message:

that extra message i added,is there a fix for that issue

It counts how many attachments a user has download.
I would need to look into this user along with acp access to figure it out.

I probably did something wrong here. Anyway, I would like to ask you.
I uploaded and imported your hack. I went to vBulletin Options "Limit Attachment Downloads" and turned that on. I changed "Download Limit Time Frame" to 30 Minutes (I think this means the user needs to wait 30 minutes until he can download again, right?)
So I went to Attachment Manager and changed the values for ZIP files, cause I only want to test it with ZIP's for now. I changed "Limit Downloads with this Attachment Type" to Yes.
Then I went to the Usergroup Manager and edited the Administrator Attachment privileges.
But no matter how often I change the value to YES, when I reload the privileges page, it changed back to No.... :-/

Ok, I reinstalled it and its actually changed to Yes now. But anyway, I can still download as many times I want.
"Download Attachment Limit" is set to 2. So in my understanding, this should let me get 2 downloads in 30 minutes.

It seems to be working now.
Not sure though. Is it possible to download the same file X time even with the limitation in place? Or is this because it's cached in the browser?

Any updates on hack?

How did you fix the problem you had before? It seems to be allowing me to download endlessly.

To do what?

thanks for this great hack :)

fantastic hack.... thx abe1.... *installed* :D

Abe1
We wanna you to add new feature for this hack like , speed limit , member change protect , and anything new , because it's really cool hack .
Thanks

uninstalled me because it does not limit project tools attachements and blog attachement, no need of an addon doing half of its job...

I was logged in as administrator. It seems like admins can download as much as they want.
Try creating a regular user and see if you can still download as you please.

OK I tried a bunch of things and I still get this problem

i turn the hack off

empty the attachment_limit table

turn it on

when a user tries to download they get this message

You have reached your download limit. You will be able to download again on 01-01-1970 at 07:00 PM.

any ideas

using 3.6.8 pl2
PHP Version 5.2.5-pl0-gentoo
apache 2

thanks you!!!

Abe1
We hope to see in your hack MaxConnections feature to attachments

very good click installed and nominated for this months :D thanks

same here :erm:
did you fix this problem ?

nope i just un installed it

I love this hack, but how can I edit the text that a user see's when they hit the limit ?

Edit the phrase.

Anyone tried if this mod works with 3.7 ?

Thanks,

Sorry for being thick, but where ?
I can edit it before installing it and it works, but can it be edited/changed after installing ?

does it work with 3.7.2?

Any answer to this ?

Thanks.

I found the answer myself.

Yes you can. But you'll need to customize it though the phrase manager. It's so much easier to just edit the xml and reinstall it.

This was working very well until I installed the 'Guests can view thumbnails/Watermark hack (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=141883).

Now it doesn't work, it just lets anyone download any amount instead of bringin up the message, If I disable the 'Guests can view thumbnails/Watermark' hack then it works again.

Thats a pain, I really need both to work :(

work whit 3.7 :)

Anyone has it working on 3.7.2?

Has anyone had this working on 3.7.3 pl1 all we are getting is the error message below.

Block Disabled:      (Update License Status)
Suspended or Unlicensed Members Cannot View Code.

I love the idea of this mod and I hope we can use it on 3.8.

I'm testing this out on vB 3.8.0 beta2.

It half works for me. Or maybe it's working twice as well. :rolleyes:

My problem is that every time an attachment is clicked on, it is getting counted twice.

I checked the entries in phpMyAdmin and I see that each time an attachment is clicked, two rows are being added to my attachment_limit table.

For example, I set the attachment limit to be 5.

The first time an attachment is clicked, it adds two rows to the attachment_limit table.
The second time an attachment is clicked, it adds another two rows to the attachment_limit table.
The third time an attachment is clicked, it adds a row (the fifth row) and then puts up the message:

Block Disabled:      (Update License Status)
Suspended or Unlicensed Members Cannot View Code.

Abe1 or anyone else notice this behavior while testing in 3.8 ? Or can suggest how to correct the double entries for each attachment download?

Thanks,
James

Now this is odd...

I did some more testing with another file type.

My first test was with .ZIP files and each .ZIP file download was being counted twice.

My last test was with .JPG files and each .JPG was only being counted once, as expected.

Does anyone know why the counter would add two entries for .ZIP files, but only one for .JPG files? :confused:

Thanks,
James

I would hav to check your site out. Really wierd. Works fine in my tests.

I think it's some sort of bug with 3.8.0 beta2 where the attachment_display hook is called twice for files where the browser is forcing the user to download the file.

I reported the bug here.

I did some more tests and actually believe that the entire attachment.php script may be being called twice for some reason. :confused:

I haven't had a chance to go back and check this on my 3.7 test forum yet. For now I think I'll wait and see what happens with the bug report over at vbulletin.com

Thanks,
James

Will try this later

Is there any similar mod for 3.8.x, tried searching but couldn't find.
Hope this one gets updated at least. It is very useful but I've tried it and it gives wrong date like year 1970 or 2070 and some members reported that they didn't download anything close to the limit and they were still restricted from downloading.

Actually uninstalled it and installed again, it seems to work fine now. I ran build bitfields afterward just to see if that helps, don't know if it did or not, but glad it is working fine now.

Ok, found where the bug is.
If the member has additional usergroup assigned. He is given the restriction on first download attempt and year is 1970.

Any idea for a fix please?

If this mod ever works for unregistered users please let me know!

My forum is set up as a photo galleries forum with 100,000+ photos. I'd love to be able to limit guests to say 20 attachment views per day. 'Good incentive to register, without scaring them off completely.

very nice

downloaded, installed, works perfectly!