XF 2.2 How to handle attachment in a new forum?

[NHUN]

Hi Guys!
Im NOT an IT guy, but I know when it comes to attachments its better to prevent any issues, before we activate a new site. So how should i prevent the big file sizes?
Im open to paid method (that would save money and headche on the long run). SO how should I handle attachments?
Amazon S3? Bunny net? Cloudflare? Any other suggession?

As said Im not an IT guy, so if you recomment me anything, please do send me a link how should I set it up.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Chromaniac]

complex question lol. 20 year old forum here and i have never had attachments enabled except for a few weeks now and then and it always appeared to be heading for a pain so i ended up disabling it. hosting is pretty cheap these days so storage costs is not an issue unless you are going to enable uploading of videos and other kind of large files. upcoming 2.3 would use webp for images so that would sort out the image size issue which is a pretty big problem currently. using an object storage solution is definitely a good idea from the start as you do not really have to worry about migration in future or keeping data backed up. cloudflare r2 is a good option. first you need to decide what kind of attachments are you planning to support and be ready to see people upload all kind of useless files for whatever reasons

 

[NHUN]

complex question lol. 20 year old forum here and i have never had attachments enabled except for a few weeks now and then and it always appeared to be heading for a pain so i ended up disabling it. hosting is pretty cheap these days so storage costs is not an issue unless you are going to enable uploading of videos and other kind of large files. upcoming 2.3 would use webp for images so that would sort out the image size issue which is a pretty big problem currently. using an object storage solution is definitely a good idea from the start as you do not really have to worry about migration in future or keeping data backed up. cloudflare r2 is a good option. first you need to decide what kind of attachments are you planning to support and be ready to see people upload all kind of useless files for whatever reasons

AS far as I know 2.3 will be in the far future.... yeah Im sure they will release it next year? the year after? But due to incompatibility it wont be a go to for a lot of people. I have some add-ons, custom theme that was made to let the website pass as our main WP site so XF is integrated.

I wouldnt update unless it is 100% compatible, so even if it use webp I think theres workaround it? Maybe?

Like automatic webp converter on S3 or something?

I dont know, but Im not the guy that have a 20 yo forum

Still I want to let the visitors leave pictures, if theres an option to convert them down or stg that would be great, or use other options that make it so that I dont have to deal with attachments for a very long time.

 

[Chromaniac]

I am hoping to see it release before the end of the year lol. But of course, hard to say. In any case, 2.3 would have a converter for existing images so existing image content would not be a problem whenever it does arrive and you install.

There are existing addons that can optimize images!

Image Optimizer for XF 2.0

Jan 2, 2018

Optimize all attachments in your forum to save disk space.

• truonglv
• image image optimization optimizer
• Add-ons [2.x]

But you would have to deal with them pretty much till the time you run the site. Object Storage solutions like S3/R2 would mean that you wouldn't need to manually migrate them anytime you change your hosting so that's handy. It wasn't an option in early days when I started out so it was just painful to backup and migrate which is why I never ended up enabling it. If I had, I would probably have a few hundred gigs of data I had to manage by now.

 

[Seeker-Smith]

One of my sites has over 1 million attachments. No big deal. Only members can access full size. Just set your max size for image and video. You can also site physical size 1000 x 800 as example.

 

[NHUN]

One of my sites has over 1 million attachments. No big deal. Only members can access full size. Just set your max size for image and video. You can also site physical size 1000 x 800 as example.

I see. So till then that's the way to go?
Add-on + max file size?

For 1000x800px my only issue is that if it's not an on-site transformation it's a pain in the ass for users to make them resize, crop the image before upload.

I would rather have them upload any size (or max 5mb) and the site convert it to webp or low res and crop it below 1000px....
Is there such option / add-on?

 

[Chromaniac]

xenforo handles resize out of the box. 2.3 would improve this massively but for now, very large images can fail on upload.

webp support is not available currently. the addon i linked to above seems to support webp i believe. but i would suggest sticking to native xenforo features for the time being and get 2.3 to optimize images as and when it arrives. unlikely you would end up with gigabytes of images in a matter of months

 

[Overscan]

If the images posted on your forum are ephemeral and old topics don't get regular posts, then it doesn't matter too much. In my case images are important to the forum content and some topics have been going for 18 years, so it's vital to host the attachments yourself or you get topics full of broken image links. Object store seems the best way, I'll be moving to that with 2.3 upgrade I think.

 

[Seeker-Smith]

I see. So till then that's the way to go?
Add-on + max file size?

For 1000x800px my only issue is that if it's not an on-site transformation it's a pain in the ass for users to make them resize, crop the image before upload.

I would rather have them upload any size (or max 5mb) and the site convert it to webp or low res and crop it below 1000px....
Is there such option / add-on?

I don't set max size just a file size 500 mb image and 5 gb for video. But I have no storage size limits.

 

[Chromaniac]

this addon just released can probably get you started with webp right away on 2.2.x

Thread '[DBTech] DragonByte WebP'

Mar 16, 2024

DragonByte Tech submitted a new resource:

DragonByte WebP - Adds WebP support for XenForo Image Uploader and image processing libraries.

Description
Adds WebP support to your XenForo 2.2 forum, including the Image Uploader and GD/Imagick image processing libraries. 3rd party add-ons can then allow WebP images to be uploaded, and they'll process normally.

Uses
By adding WebP support, your 3rd party addons can implement .webp uploads to enable better quality images with a smaller file size.


Extended Product Information...

• DragonByte Tech

• 

 

[Opus X]

If the images posted on your forum are ephemeral and old topics don't get regular posts, then it doesn't matter too much. In my case images are important to the forum content and some topics have been going for 18 years, so it's vital to host the attachments yourself or you get topics full of broken image links. Object store seems the best way, I'll be moving to that with 2.3 upgrade I think.

same as a site I am staff on. images are a very important part of that site as it deals with astro photography and those images are from the members and we would rather have them uploaded to the site. i persoanlly was hit by the remote hosted image issue when Photobucket decision to go to a paid format. many of my shared images went to the bit bucket. the site owner has an plug in that compresses uploaded images from their original size (from 16MB up to 50MB) so he apparently has plans for when his space runs out.