Okay, some side questions.

I have the download manager now installed on another site that I'm admining for. On Friday, they send out a newsletter to roughly 12,000 subscribed members advertising the download for that day. They will typically have roughly 2-3,000 hits on it by the end of the day.

We are seeing a huge strain on the main database, which is on the main server. A new server, dedicated to the downloads, has been purchased. Now the question is.. can we have a seperate database just for the link manager, or does it have to be inside the forum database? Right now, when that newsletter goes out, it overloads the database and shuts down the site, which is bad because the store is also there.

Second issue:

Older install... those who are allowed to upload can do so, but it's putting all their files into "moderate". I've looked everywhere to see if it's really set to moderate them, but can't find anything. It's driving me batty. Ideas?

I have the forum itself set up for ET (-5)
I have the user set up for CST (-6)

I just installed the newest version, and it's still doing this.

Here are some screen shots.

When I first go in to enter a new entry. This shows the current time for CST (the user).

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/

I change the time to 9:30 AM on January 30th and press submit.

I go back in and edit, and now it shows this:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/

So it took my CST 9:30 and changed it to ET, which would be 8:30 a.m.

It didn't work this way in 2.2.6. When you go in to add in 2.2.6, it would show the ET even if your member was set to CST.

Edit the category; go to the Control Settings tab; choose Photo Album for template_linkbit; and set link_cols_display to whatever number of columns you want.

You can do it directly with the urls

or you can go to search/advanced search and enter the username

or (with the standard linkbit) you can find an extry by the user of interest and click on the magnifying glass just to the right of the username

Do you mean that you want LDM to modify the zip file to insert a password into it?

Or do you mean that you want the user to be prompted for a password before being able to download the zip?

The first can be done with a tool like winzip. Currently, LDM has no password features built into it - I've not tested, but I imagine that you could route access via a password protected VB forum.

I never dreamed that this would end up being a heavyweight....

First thing to work out is whether it is the load on the database that is killing your server, or the physical effort of transferring the files which are being downloaded. I would be inclined to suspect the second - recall that the files themselves are not stored in the database.

Second, how are the urls being specified for the downloads? If they are being entered as full urls (even if this is the same server), this is a sure fire recipe for hammering the server. Far better to have the files specified using a local filename (or uploaded, which amounts to the same thing).

I really don't know about being able to run LDM in its own VB database - but one way that should work is to have two installations of VB on the same server, and use one of them for LDM. Might need some clever work to keep the usernames in sync.

Take a look at the Control Settings tab for the category into which they are uploading (or its parents), as well as the Admin/Settings page. Moderation can be set on a per-category basis and globally.

OK, will dig into this. I spend my life zipping between time zones :confused: so I'm surprised that I never tried this myself.

Hey, if you would stop providing such wonderful customer support.. we would stop using the program ;) Okay really, please don't!! We're about to create a gold shrine in your honor.

We'll go ahead and start with storing the files on the server that is solely dedicated to downloads... and see how that works. I do know that we get SQL errors when this happens, so that's why I'm assuming it's to much work on the database instead of the server itself.

The problem that I have had w/ the full urls/local filename is that we've never been able to get it working on our server. Anything over 5MB fails, so we have to do the full URL. We upped our PHP Maximum Upload Size to 50.00 MB.. still didn't help.. but I'm guessing I didn't do something right somewhere. I'll do some more reading about this because I think I did see you had posted something about this situation in this thread.

I double checked and this isn't an issue w/ 2.2.6, which we have installed on the main site...

I'm wondering though if maybe I did something wrong in the configuration of vBulletin though... can anyone else confirm that it's doing this in 2.2.7? When I go into vB's options to set time and set it to ET, it reads -4 instead of -5, even though I picked -5. Maybe that is the issue and it's all my side :( I don't want to send you on a wild goose chase!

Andrew, I still haven't heard a response from you about my question... is there any way we can choose permissions for categories rather than the entire LDM manager and forum permissions? Like, say in one category, I have a bunch of WMV videos that people can stream in the jukebox and save, and in another category they can only stream the WMV files in the jukebox, not save them. I've noted that you could do this with usergroups, but I need it to be done with categories.

I was actually after an answer to the latter. But thanks for answering both. I'll try routing the access to a protected forum like you suggested. :)