Attachment subfolders

[Knot]

Sorry if this topic don't follow the rules, and sorry for my english!

FTP clients have a limit for 1998 files per folder. If you have more then 1998 files in /file folder you can't see all the files. This is bad to make backups using FTP Clients.
Lots of files in the same folder isn't good for the server too.
My request is to use this in the next phpBB (The autor speaks english):
http://www.phpbbchina.com/forum/viewtop ... =23&t=3337

It has 3 funtions, but I'm asking only for the option to atach the files in subfolders. You can use the YEAR_MONTH model for the name of new folders, or other model.
I use it in my forum because I have more then 6000 attachments, and I think this is very useful.

Ticket created: http://tracker.phpbb.com/browse/PHPBB3-10119

[Noxwizard]

Just to clarify, the limit is not in the FTP client, it's in the FTP daemon's settings. cPanel defaults to 2000 (1998 files/directories plus . and ..).

[Knot]

Just to clarify, the limit is not in the FTP client, it's in the FTP daemon's settings. cPanel defaults to 2000 (1998 files/directories plus . and ..).

Ok, but if you don't have acess to Cpanel you can't change this. And the all attachments in same folder is a large number of files to a single folder. Now I have a dedicated server so I don't have problems, but when I had my forum in shared servers, the administrators servers allways sent messages to me to didn't put many files in the same folder.

[bantu]

phpBB 3.0.x is not able to reliably create directories because of issues with safe_mode, if I remember correctly. Thus, the approach of generating subfolders in files generally doesn't work. This might no longer be the case with PHP 5.2, but I don't know.

As a workaround we could strip off the first character of the physical filename and ship 16 subfolders in files in our packages, but that would only move the problem to another limit (~16 * 2000 instead of ~2000).

I kind of doubt that this limit also affects SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) which should be prefered for various reasons (one being encryption). Remember that FTP is like 100 years old.

Edit: There are however also filesystem limits on the number of files that can be stored in one folder (FAT32 has a limit of 65535 according to my quick research). We should probably look into that too.

[canonknipser]

I know this topic is a few days old
I would really like to see this feature added in a future release, because currently we have more than 70,000 files in the file-folder (we force our members to use the attachment-function instead of using external hosted images), the board is up now for 2 1/2 years.

phpBB 3.0.x is not able to reliably create directories because of issues with safe_mode, if I remember correctly. Thus, the approach of generating subfolders in files generally doesn't work. This might no longer be the case with PHP 5.2, but I don't know.

save_mode is removed in PHP 5.4; and with save_mode enabled a lot of other basic function may not work properly: http://de.php.net/manual/en/features.sa ... ctions.php

As a fallback, if creating a subdir via mkdir()-function fails, we can still use the basic path or use the pre-implemented structure oleg mentioned.

The creation of subdirs should be configurable; on our board, i decided to use a folder structure following the date rule 'Ym/w' (first level subfolders for year and month, second level subfolder numeric expression of weekday), but it should be a decision of board administrator.

[naderman]

Moved this to discussion. If people still want to see this I would suggest someone creates a detailed RFC explaining exactly what configuration would be necessary and where it should be located in the ACP. What the default behaviour should be and how the transition from one attachment subdirectory scheme to another should work. It should probably also feature some research into the ability to create directories with all php configurations and on all supported platforms.

[canonknipser]

RFC created: viewtopic.php?f=108&t=42329