Attachment Views Flood Check

[AlexanderT]

Only 56 thread views, but 4163 attachment views: We all know how wrongly configured download clients and search bots gone berserk can inflate the view counts of attachments.

To solve the problem, I wrote this mini-mod that (temporarily) stores the information of the downloader - more specifically, it generates and stores a hash made out of his IP, his User ID (0 for guests), and the Attachment ID. This hash will "timeout" after x seconds (default: 60) and the timeout will be renewed whenever the person reinitiates the download within that time-frame. In other words, only when there's no download attempt within x seconds will a new download request by the same user of the same attachment be considered a new view count.

This mod adds 1 to 2 highly optimized database queries whenever attachments are downloaded. Unless you run a high-traffic forum with lots and lots of attachment downloads, this should not cause any problems.

This mod also requires a tiny filechange; you find the installation instruction in the attached readme.txt.

Tips for improvements are always welcomed. Also feel free to build your own products based on this one (with attribution please).

[maxicep]

thanks reserved.

[muratksk]

thanks :)

[Hornstar]

Thanks, I aways thought that maybe a member had a bot, that just kept downloading the attachment over and over to waste my bandwidth.

[AlexanderT]

Thanks, I aways thought that maybe a member had a bot, that just kept downloading the attachment over and over to waste my bandwidth.

Note that this mod does not prevent users from reinitiating a download (it would be trivial to implement though!). It only prevents them from artificially increasing the download views counter.