Files/Download Manager For Discourse

[riking (Kane York)]

I think that your best bet for that is to host the files somewhere with access control, ACLs and stuff. Google Docs/Drive is a good example of that.

[purldator (mountain)]

Hmm. Or possibly OwnCloud. At least an idea to explore!

[Qasem_h]

any new idea for media/file manager ??

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

@purldator

reason I can see this as something useful is to handle downloads. Like a download manager to pass and handle permissions per file.

@elberet

Per-file permissions would be a completely new feature for Discourse and require a lot more work before the UI becomes relevant. Not that such permissions wouldn’t be welcome… right now, if you are logged in and know a file’s URL, you can download the file even if it was posted in a restricted category that you cannot access or in a direct message.

@purldator

Yeah, that’s a bit of a problem. That would rely on users or staff being honest and not sharing links.

@riking

Uploads do not have source information associated with them, the only protection available is “prevent anons from downloading files”.

My «Restrict Files» plugin solves the problem of access control to forum digital content (downloads).
The forum owner can grant the download permissions only to a particular forum groups / or to users with specified trust level and withdraw download permissions from other groups / users.
An example of restricted file: http://discourse.pro/file/113
You can not download it neither anonymously nor by just registering on the forum.
You must be a member of permitted user group to download the file.
You can test it yourself:
A test account without download permissions: login: test_bob, password: 123456
A test account with download permissions: login: test_john, password: 654321
A file is always permitted to be downloaded by its uploader.

[jord8on (Jordan)]

I love this example provided here.

I’m wondering about something with uploaded images.

I often upload an image and then change my mind… delete the image, and maybe upload a different one.

I’m assuming that unused uploaded files, like that, are still stored on my instance somewhere.

Is there some kind of auto-remove feature that removes a file that’s not actually displayed somewhere or attached to any topics? I’m assuming not.

It would be helpful to see a list of the files being used on our instance, like the example @tobiaseigen gave, but also see where the asset is used/displayed… or that it’s NOT being used displayed.

Perhaps this is such an uncommon use case that it wouldn’t be worth developing a feature like this. 2mb doesn’t make a huge diff in storage… but if there’s a lot of this happening, in a big forum, over time… maybe it becomes more of a concern ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[riking (Kane York)]

Update: This feature has been implemented.

Secure Media Uploads

Added in the Discourse 2.4 release in February is the Secure Media feature, which provides a higher degree of security for ALL uploads (images, video, audio, text, pdfs, zips, and others) within a Discourse instance. Prerequisites You must have S3 uploads enabled on your site, which needs the following settings to be filled: S3 access key id S3 secret access key S3 region S3 upload bucket You also must be using an S3 bucket that does not have a Public bucket policy, and you need to make sure…

[riking (Kane York)]

@jord8on

Is there some kind of auto-remove feature that removes a file that’s not actually displayed somewhere or attached to any topics? I’m assuming not.

Yes, files that are not present in any non-deleted post are “tombstoned” after (7?) days and deleted after another (14?) days.