heh still saying that same thing.... i tried the first method. can you send me a screenshot of your configuration so i can campare it to mine though

I'm not sure what part of my configuration you want to see. The error message you are reporting is coming from a file check in local_links.php, which says that it can't find the file you have entered. I need to see the results of the script I uploaded a few minutes ago to see what's happening on your server.

Which directory have you uploaded the mp3 file into? Is it your forum directory?

nope not in my fourm directory, in a diff folder, and heres a lil screen of what im seeing.

The screenshot is saying that the code can't find your file, i.e. it thinks that what you are entering in the URL box does not point to your mp3.

You either have to give a full URL pointing to that directory, or you have to give an absolute filename starting with a / and going down from your root directory. The code is trying to look for a file, starting from your root directory

i.e. if you have put the mp3 in a directory called music/files, then you should give as url http://yoursite/music/files/mp3file.mp3 or /music/files/mp3file.mp3

Are you sure you've entered all these correctly?

just tried this method "/music/files/mp3file.mp3" instead of the full url one now, and once i clicked submit it showed that it was working but then when i tired to click the link it gave me this message "Sorry - link does not seem to be available at present."

I have to go out now for a while - I'll probably PM you something this evening to run so that I can see what is going on.

Go to your adminCP
select "attachments" >> "Extensions & Sizes"

Select "Add new attachment type"

Extension = mp3
Max File size = (whatever you want)
Mime Type = Content-type: audio/x-mp3

If that doesnt work, try....

Content-type: audio/x-mpg
Content-type: audio/x-mpegurl
Content-type: audio/mpeg

more MIME types

If that doesnt work, put anyimage.jpg in the same directory and try linking to that. This will tell you if it's something to do with the filetype, or server path/directory. Check the CHMOD for the folder make sure you have read permissions set. Post a direct link to the file on your forum somewhere and click on the link - does your browser download the file?.

HTH

audio/mpeg
is the proper one

Did that fix your problem?

nope, still getting that unavailable message :(

Let's try the questions I asked earlier.

a) What is the full public URL, including your site name, to the file you are trying to make available? (send me this by PM if you don't want to let others know - I'm not interested in hacking your site)
b) What are the results of running the short script I posted for you to test.

The local_links code is not as helpful as it might be when it can't find a file, but I think it's working, and would like to get to the bottom of this before others have problems.

I'm thinking of just uninstalling this, cause im somewhat too busy to deal with the whole problem of trying to figure out the problem/fix it lol. But... I'm sure most of you have seen php-nuke and how it has a download section built into the script thats protected..etc. Well Hopefully someone will come out with one of those, cause that's exactly what i've been needing..

That, of course, is entirely up to you, but then please don't expect people to spend time helping you. You're making half statements about what you want, and about what doesn't work, etc. Please take the time to follow these statements through.

That last thing about the php-nuke thing was just a similar topic about what would be nice to have, but the deal with this thing not working ive came through with my statements fine. Maybe not as details as you wish, but not too bad.

Well I'll try to help solve the problem cause I'm having the same results. Doesnt matter if i use the full url or the /file/file.jpg method i still cant download the file. It either says file unavailable or its a broken link. Just tell me what you want me to do. :)

Thanks,

Mark

Edit: Results of the tryit.php file.

#/home/plmtech/public_html#

Ok, the link works fine when i try it with a image, but when i try it with a PDF file and I have added that extention to the extention list. It wont work. Must have something to do with extentions that are added. I know i can download pdf from my board cause i have posted them in threads and they download fine.

Thanks, Mark.

Pls upload the attached local_links.php. THis has a load of debugging statements in it. There's also a minor bug fix - if you had been providing files less than 1k in size, it would have reported that these were "not available".

Then a) try setting up a file that you think should work but gives you the "not available" message (Add link) & record the various debug messages that come up on the screen; then b) edit the file, make no changes, just submit, and record the messages again; finally, c) click on a link that has been set up correctly, which gives the broken link message, and record the message a third time. That should give me enough to go on.

Apologies for the hassle - so many differences between different systems.

Step A results:

debug... url=#http://www.plmtech.com/downloads/car...rigerants.pdf#
Array ( [scheme] => http [host] => www.plmtech.com [path] => /downloads/carrier/alternative_refrigerants.pdf )
remote, fopen ok
Entry added successfully and link checked ok
please record these messages then click here to continue


Step B results:

debug... url=#http://www.plmtech.com/downloads/car...rigerants.pdf#
Array ( [scheme] => http [host] => www.plmtech.com [path] => /downloads/carrier/alternative_refrigerants.pdf )
remote, fopen ok
Entry edited successfully and link checked ok
please record these messages then click here to continue


Step C results:

debug... url=#http://www.plmtech.com/downloads/car...rigerants.pdf#
Array ( [scheme] => http [host] => www.plmtech.com [path] => /downloads/carrier/alternative_refrigerants.pdf )
Known mimetype - fopen http://www.plmtech.com/downloads/car...frigerants.pdf worked ok, so download should work properly
header Content-type: application/pdf
56 blocks read


Let me know if i can do more. You've done all the work here, i'm more than glad to help you perfect it or help me fix what i have done wrong. :)

Thanks,

Mark

If you prefer I'll give you and admin account on my board and you can take a look for yourself too. :)

Ok, I think i figured it out. It has to do with the spaces in the file your trying to download. If the name of the file has a space it has the dead link problem. When i removed the spaces link works fine.

Mark

Yes, you've sorted it out Mark, thanks. I'll have a look which is the best way to correct this - the official way is to turn spaces into %20's and so on.

No problem man. Thanks for the hack man. This is great stuff and really is what i needed. Is there any way to make a new window open when someone clicks the link rather than open in the current window?

Thanks again,

Mark

It's set up to open the link in a window called "_new", which should be a new window. Under what circumstances are you finding that it's reusing the window? In any case, this is defined in the links_linkbit template - maybe you could try changing the target setting in that. Standard VB uses _blank. I understand that there may be problems with some popup blockers in using _blank.

It reuses the existing window with all links that have I have tried but all i have tried is with a pdf or gif file. I'll check those templates but strange that it doesnt work like you indicated. I'm not using any pop up blocker so its not that.

Mark

Great.
Changing it to _blank did the trick man.

Once someone does a rating on the link the file size disappears. Is there a way to keep that files size since most all of my links will be for downloads?

Ok, I know i just keep wanting more and more but i have to ask. Alot of my files are pdf files and since adobe uses that stupid browser plug-in to open pdf files inside the browser. I would give my right arm I could force the link to prompt to save the file rather than open it in there browser and i know the user can set his setting to do that but it would be much easier if i could make that happen on my side with having to get all those people to setup there preference correctly.

Mark

I'll make this change in the standard templates for the next release

Doesn't do this for me - can you give a bit more detail? Alternatively, can you set up a page where the problem has occurred, use your browser to do a "show source" and then pm me the results.

This drives me spare as well. But I tried right clicking on the link and then selecting "save as" and it worked - didn't expect that but it was ok. At least this is what happens with IE6 - it didn't work with Mozilla Firebired

PM sent.

Also see screen image.

that still doesnt explain why it didnt work for me when i didnt have any spaces lol

Not sure AE. For me, I had same exact problem as you with space but no one problem with spaces removed.

AndrewD:
My other problem with the rating showing and the file size not showing was only with that one link and that link was made when i was having all of my other problems. But all others work fine so i just deleted that one and re-set it up and all is well now.

Thanks,

Mark

Is your links directory attached to a password protected or restricted access forum?

This is close to what I needed but would like a counter for downloadable files. And admincp intergration would be better.

What do you mean by a counter? - there is a count of how often each link/file has been hit, i.e. downloaded if its a file - do you mean a count of how many entries are there in total?

As for integration with the admincp, the installation instructions explain how to do that. The reason I did not make this the default is that it will create an extra task whenever the good guys at VBulletin issue a new release.

Mark, I had wondered. Downloads only show a size if the code thinks the file is on the local host and so can use a stat() call to get file details. For remote files, you would have to read the file completely in order to find how big they are, so the size check is skipped.

Installed this hack yesterday, have founds some bugs.

The first bug is that you dont use THIS_SCRIPT to often, in the install-script you have alot of the links containing local_ for "next step", "run step 1", etc in the HTML, also, one of the queries, "ALTER TABLE local_linksltoc ADD INDEX ( linkid ) " will give an error if you dont change it to use THIS_SCRIPT.

The second thing i dont like is that the Forum-Jump dropdown is placed at the top right of the links pages when it should be at the left bottom as on every other page?

Thanks. The install script seems to have one missing table prefix, on linksltoc - the rest are script names, which I will parameterise but should not cause errors unless you deliberately rename the script.

The placement of the forum jump dropdown is, as they say, a feature :devious:. We put it in that position consistently on our main board because we found people were not spotting it down the bottom of the page. Just edit the linksheader template and put it where you want.

working great for me now :)

thanks very much

is there any chance of having an upload feature so my members can upload files and use this just as a downloads section ?

Regards
Mickie

Mickie, glad things are working fine.

As for uploads/downloads, I leave that for someone else to sort out. The security issues seem pretty horrendous to me, and we don't allow our users to upload onto our site. Perhps this should be handled as some sort of tie in with the new VB attachments system?

Just had a problem.

This has been working fine for me for a while now, but suddenly today the system has flagged *every* link (200+ of them) as broken. Any thoughts on why it might do this?

Have you just done a revalidation via the admin page, or is this spontaneous? And are your links on or off your site?

The "validate" procedure tries to open a connection to all your links. If the call fails (timeout, etc), then the link is flagged as unavailable.

Perhaps you could pm me or post one of the apparently bad links? I'll try to see iof anything obvious is going on.

AndrewD do you have any idea on how that add on hack works that Natch wrote do you. He must be on vacation cause I'm having a few problems and he in hiding. If not i understand and i know i probably shouldnt be asking for this here.

Mark

I stop visiting the board for 3 days and I'm in hiding ?

The problem you are having (unless I'm mistaken) is assocaited with the links not pointing to files that exist ...

First off, I want to say GREAT hack, super easy installation worked great!

Is there a way to set the display order of the categories or links? Didn't know if I was missing something. I went back and looked through most of the messages and couldn't find anything on this. If not available now, is this something that might be added in future releases?

Thanks for your work on this.

G