A way to monitor user-uploaded files 🖼️

Feature
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1

For moderation purposes, it would be useful to be able to see and browse files uploaded by users, especially since users can upload files in personal messages.

Currently, the only ways to see these files, as far as I know, are:

  • Browsing the /uploads/ folder

  • Using the search with the with:images or filetypes:ext1,ext2,ext3 filters

  • Using data explorer

Those are not very practical ways to monitor files uploaded on the forum.

I talked about this feature idea somewhere else but it’s better if it has its dedicated topic.

Even without going as far as a media library, being able to monitor these files would be great.

For example, a new admin route that displays all recently uploaded files, with a few filters:

  • Dates

  • Users

  • File types

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This is what I envisioned:

The plugin adds an admin-only admin/uploads route to browse and filter site-wide user uploads.

Features:

  • List all uploads with thumbnails
  • Infinite scrolling
  • Filter by username and dates

:warning: It’s 99% AI-generated and the code wasn’t really reviewed. Don’t install it if you can’t review the code yourself and decide it’s safe to use.
I don’t encourage AI plugin development by non-developers, and this plugin should be considered as nothing but a proof of concept.

Now, if a developer wants to look at what is probably awful code, or use it as some sort of inspiration for a more serious and robust project, please do. :+1:

Repo: https://github.com/Canapin/discourse-uploads-library

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I voted for this feature because I think as a forum’s user volume grows, media uploads eventually requiring more storage volume will require server upgrades in turn increasing cost to run the forum. Eventually a greater volume of users may require more RAM or CPU power but I suspect storage volume will be the first thing to force an upgrade. Some way to easily review what is being uploaded would provide some assurance that storage isn’t being wasted. One image requires as much storage as a very large volume of text.

Ownership of a forum’s data is a strong incentive for running a discourse instance instead of a social media group where the data is owned, stored and shared with a global corporation. Part of the paradox though is that if a user uploads a image or video and the forum administrator a few years later deletes the image because they are running out of storage space, the user may be upset. Once an image is uploaded to a discourse forum it become part of the forum’s legacy.

This recent topic about file optimization was interesting to me because I was relatively sure Discourse down sampled / compressed very large image files, but I was reassured to learn more. Discourse has a lot of good tools to restrict upload file size limits. Some type of tool to review, batch optimize and possible delete images would be a powerful administrative tool for Discourse.

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Yep, this idea does come up from time to time as well and fits with the more general idea proposed in this topic.

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I added a feature. On a thumbnail click, it shows the posts that contain the uploads and differentiates regular posts from PMs.

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This looks super useful! :smiley:
I’m not qualified to vet the code, but I hope somebody will take it on.

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Nice!

One tiny issue, if the file is a .png, it opens full screen instead of giving info about the file location.

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Yeah, it’s not a matter of extension, it did that for files not associated with any post; Meaning files used in deleted posts, or uploaded through other means (like avatars, or files created by Discourse in general).

I fixed it (it now says there are no associated posts), and added the author of each upload as well on the library.

chrome_ASuIHjCMXz

I don’t think I’ll add more feature on this plugin, I added ruby and js tests to help, but that’s it.

If more feature are needed, they should be made in a real plugin made by a real developer. :smile:

5 Likes