It's not the same. You and I don't come here to chat and post only. The main purpose of vb.org is to serve as a central point for release software modifications, the work of many authors.

You are entitled to suggest that authors should have no say about their work, I just think it's wrong, and the more it's done, the more it will reduce the quality of work being released.

Not sure what GNU has to do with this.

So why be so secretive to hide the reason for such a "rule" change?

Forum mods don't usually have to go in these circles trying to justify why the rules are being changed, yet can't say why, then try different reasons, like bandwith, yeah, that's the ticket.

I am still amazed that this discussion is still going on - people, all we are asking is that you zip up files before attaching them - this is a download site - zipping up the downloads is a reasonable request.

I do note that the whole debate is fueled only by a small minority of members.

Bear in mind that things like this are always under review and such requirements may change when the needs of the site changes - if so, we will notify the members.

I am happy to discuss this further via PM.

What I'll do is split this thread up so that the discussion occurs in the Site Feedback forum.

Thread split and moved. :)

Feel free to keep discussing.

I do want to add that if lots of hack authors start complaining that zipping up attachments is too much of an inconvenience and that it really is a huge problem, then obviously we will review the need to do it. I do not want to appear that we are not listening to feedback. However, it does appear that most hack authors don't really care and would not mind zipping up attachments. Please correct me if I am wrong though.

There seems little point really - as your next post seems to make it clear that if only a "minority" express a view [care] then you aren't going to review anything. :)

I don't mind zipping up hacks, even if it's only 1 file. When dloading a hack, however, unzipping 1 file is hassle.
I'd prefer it if you could allow an un-zipped hack to be released if it only contained 1 file (install instructions included).

I understand what you mean, although i don't agree in every situation.

What i do myself for a hack is adding the version number to the zipped name, while the hackfile itself stay with one name. Example:

My Hack v1.00.zip
-->myhack.php

My Hack v1.01.zip
-->myhack.php

This makes it easier to keep multiple versions, without changing the file names.

Also you can put in the directory structure if you are using zip-files. I see a lot less mistakes if you zip your files relative to the forumhome directory, then to instruct to upload to a specific directory.

The above are all arguments that have been used in our discussion before we started the zip-file request.

In the end we are trying to improve things, and if something doesn't work out as we expected, we can always review it, and make adjustments, or turn things back.

That may be the case, but that doesn't mean we should close this thread and stop further discussion. :) I moved this discussion out of Announcements as such discussions belong here rather than there.

Agreed Marco ;)

But I also agree with what Paul M says - We should re-allow .txt files for single instruction files;)

Satan

Not really. I've already been zipping up my multiple-file hacks before this started. It is a download site, but a download site running gzip by default, so zipping files is redundant.

Vb.org is not really "asking", you disabled the possibility of uploading anything other than zip files, so the request doesn't make any sense.

The outrage of some developers (minority?) is due to forcing zips for single files, even for posts that are not hacks.

The outrage of another minority who speculate on the real motive (maybe just me), is that you are penalizing the many for the sins of the few. This is the case here, and is the case for disabling the who installed this hack feature. This an alarming trend, and can only get worse.

The more you put the squeeze on authors and make things less pleasant, with less tools, less say, plus a bit of suspicion, you grow a sense of "us" and "them" on this forum, you'd get less motivation, less interest and less quality of future releases. There's no real winners in this scenaro, not even Jelsoft.