[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by sonicBeagle

I'm having a hard time understanding what LDM actually does and what it looks like from a user's perspective - in other words, what a member of my board will see. Does anyone have a board using LDM where I could see it "in action"?

My problem is that I use my board as a "support site" and my users download executables and pdfs on the order of 20-120Mb. vBulletin, as far as I can tell, makes uploading large files difficult and downloading them very unreliable. So I'm trying to find a better way to post large files and make them easier for my members to pull down. Is LDM the answer?

Thanks!

Let's take your last question first. Uploading large files is difficult because the normal techniques used for the web (the HTTP protocol) are not suitable for handling these files. This is why people use FTP protocols instead, which involve different tools. HTTP is a reliable way of transferring small quantities of data. You can force it to work with larger files, but it becomes unreliable.

VBulletin aims to make life easy for people using the web, primarily for having discussions.

LDM also aims to make life easy for people on the web to share links and downloadable files, including uploading relatively small files. There are quite a number of LDM users who are using it to allow users to upload quite large files, but they need to know what they are doing. The bottom line, for files bigger than 20 MB, is the following - if you can install them on your site correctly, LDM will handle the downloading process.

As far as reliable downloads are concerned, this is again a 'feature' of the web. LDM will work smoothly with other download managers to allow failed connections, etc, to be picked up and corrected.

However, I do not recommend that you rely on it as a general purpose uploading tool for large files.