Allow Admins to Disable Uploads

[nahtnam]

Hey!

Why not allow admins to disable the upload button since s3 is now deprecated, and will soon be removed? This will force users to use something like imgur to host their images. I think it would be a good feature since sites hosted on something like OVH or Digital Ocean (w/ small disk sizes) would be able to be used instead of having to upgrade only for more disk space.

Thanks.

[codinghorror]

It is rare that sites need a ton of storage unless they are hard core photography sites, or based on file sharing. Lots of services like YouTube, SoundCloud, Flickr, etc let people host audio, video, and big pictures for nothing.

My point is that embedding remote content is way more common than uploading.

Beyond that, we do believe in automagically mirroring remotely linked images so topics do not break later when someone removes a remote image on some remote server. That is why remote mirroring is on by default.

[nahtnam]

Well the forum im setting up is going to be on a video game. People will be uploading lots of images/gifs of funny moments and what not. Im not sure if 30gb is going to be enough.

The current solution I have is to just limit the max file size to 1mb which means that most gifs and high res pics have to go to imgur.

[codinghorror]

Yeah, limiting file size is a better choice than outlawing it completely. The admin dashboard shows disk space used and available as of 1.2 in the bottom left.

[nahtnam]

Awesome. Hopefully my disk doesnt fill up fast.

Thanks.

[donsgood]

Whilst I see the value in limited the size of uploads, I do think it should be the admin's choice to disable uploads completely.

I'm about to start hosting a football club forum, with 10k daily page views. As it stands, we will only have $10pm to fund the hosting on DO. So any measure that I can introduce to reduce OpEx is highly desirable. Disabling uploads to reduce storage costs is definitely one of them.

[MagnumDopus]

+1 for this request. I am fine with avatar uploads, but as my forum will be largely game focused, and tons of users may attempt to upload images, I would just like to disable local file storage outside of avatars all together. This is kind of the norm with most forums these days, to rely on 3rd party hosting solutions and simply embed them.

[codinghorror]

You can already do this, just set the max allowed image size to tiny dimensions like 128 x 128.