TOPIC:

This concerns the File Manager. It seems that the file organization keeps changing whenever I go to File Manager, even if I was the last to log in. I was told by our web admin that only he and I have access to the File Manager. Do you know what's going on? Can this be rectified?

Vicki 8091

Hello Vicki;

What do you mean, about the File manager keeps changing? In what way...

1) without your club number we haven't checked a clue of what your talking about.

Hi, Vicki !!

I did manage to spot your club number in your post. There's probably no way you'd know this in advance, but you did manage to put it in a spot where it's easy to overlook. No prob...

I logged in three times to your site (over the course of about 15 minutes), and checked the file manager in the Admin Console. Everything looked the same each time for me. I'd have to agree with the others here; we might need a bit more description of what you've seen.

Since some of your files are named such that they appear to visitors as being in a sub-folder, is it possible you weren't in the File Manager, but in the visitor downloads, or member downloads areas? Might you have inadvertently opened the folder on one visit?

Also, if you went into the member Downloads on one visit, and the Public Downloads on another visit, you would see a different number of files between the two. A possibility?

Give us a bit more info and we'll help as we can.

Wes B.

Hello,
Thanks for trying to look into it. I put together a file that shows some of the changes over the past month. Please let me know what you find out and if it can be fixed. Thanks.
Vicki

Have you also checked with your club admin David? He can also log in as the admin and make changes to the File Manager. Admin logins do not show on the member login log.

Yes, I've asked him. He said he hasn't touched it. I'm the only other person who has access to the File Manager currently. The changes that keep popping up don't really make a whole lot of sense either. As VPM, I'm trying to keep the guest packet materials together but things keep getting reclassified (or unclassified).

I've also seen the addition of the "Features, Benefits and Value" brochure and I thought someone in our club had put it there, but since I've been informed I'm the only other one who has access to File Manager, David suggested that it was possibly from FTH doing updates for all the club websites. Now I'm wondering if it was some bug, because it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense that FTH would be interfering this much with that many updates to the clubs' contents within File Manager. I have however decided to make use of the brochure in our guest packet anyway.

vickiiui:

Just to confirm something, the files that seem to be changing are the "stock Toastmasters files (PDFs)" provided w/ your website, right?

They are not the files that your club uploaded... correct? (I am checking a hunch.)

There's no way for me to tell if they are stock files as I didn't always have access to File Manager. I suppose it's something you would know.

What I can tell right now is that they seem to be the same 4 files:
-Features, Benefits and Value
-Find Your Voice
-A Toastmaster Wears Many Hats
-All About Toastmasters

Those are the "stock files". I think I know what is going on...

This was the result of a well-intended change to save some space on the server that has apparently had some side-effects.

Here is how to do a fix on them. Toggle the lock icon to closed and open for each. For each, cut the description and click save with a blank description, then paste it back and click save again. (for each of these files)... This should force the server to recreate dedicated file information for your club for the "stock files".

OK, I've tried the steps in this order:
-locking,
-unlocking,
-putting in blank names,
-saving,
(-checking Member Downloads,)
-putting back in the names I cut out,
-saving,
-putting in names and folders the way I'd like,
-saving.

Let's see if this works. Btw, why did it keep changing, was it somehow tied to some master repository or some other club's File Manager? Does that source change every day? If so, then I guess I would have to wait about a day, maybe two, to see if this works. Let's cross our fingers. I'll let you know. Thx.

vickiiui wrote:

OK, I've tried the steps in this order:
-locking,
-unlocking,
-putting in blank names,
-saving,
(-checking Member Downloads,)
-putting back in the names I cut out,
-saving,
-putting in names and folders the way I'd like,
-saving.

Let's see if this works. Btw, why did it keep changing, was it somehow tied to some master repository or some other club's File Manager? Does that source change every day? If so, then I guess I would have to wait about a day, maybe two, to see if this works. Let's cross our fingers. I'll let you know. Thx.

I just looked at your files information via FTP and they look like what I would hope for. The reason for this is that we do not want to keep separate identical copies of these large "stock" PDF files for each club. Given that there are 11,000 clubs in the system, it is a pretty big chunk of space, so what you have is a link to the actual file. However, we do need to be able to have each club maintain their own names and public/members only status for the files, so we do not what that "meta information" linked... that is why I asked you to clear it out to force the system to delete the links and create your own copies.

Bottom Line: We *do* want links to the common "stock files" ... the actual files themselves, but we do not want to have the "meta information" linked.

Now I understand what you mean by well-intentioned change to save space!

So it sounds like my file links also came with the meta information links to the master copies. Because you say the procedure was to "force the system to delete the links and create [our] own copies", does this now mean that our club as an exception has actual copies, or are they still links?

I needed to verify that it could be fixed on a per club basis... thanks for your help on that.

I just completed doing the global fix. I had to ditch all the relevant links in every club's file uploads folder and replace those with actual meta information files. There will be clubs that will be ticked off because I touched their files, but hopefully you can understand why I had to do that given what you ran into.

This way of storing information in files about other files is a very old "hacky" part of the system that goes back many years... I have been wanting to replace it with a better way involving the system database, but have not gotten to it yet.

Here is a screen capture from my FTP tool for your file uploads folder on the server--some of the files were cut off at the bottom. The links at the top that show as "File Folders" are actually the links to the common files... They are not folders... I think that is a bug in the FTP tool I use. I know that because if I double click on the link, the appropriate file is downloaded, not a folder.

If you look closely, you can see the extra files that are used for tracking public/members only and the file descriptions/virtual folders. Those use to be links... that is what I changed just now for every club in the system. Again, I am not too keen on this way of storing file info... I hope to find some time to change it.

If you use the above as a guide, and consider the 11,000+ clubs in the system, you can probably understand why we may just want to provide links to common files rather than the actual files themselves. If you look at the Pathways file or the app file... in some cases we may be talking gigabytes of space taken up by duplicate files on the server.

Perhaps this is something I can put into the file manager tools in the future. e.g., allow clubs to reference a common file without having to upload it. I think that could be a win for everyone involved.

You're welcome -- I tend to have a knack for revealing tricky problems!

So, if I understand it correctly, what is stored for each club is not the pdf itself, but a file with meta information and that points to the repository's pdf, and this is still the case for my club, but the procedure that I performed is new and now the file structure won't keep changing (but it would keep changing for other clubs for now). Is that correct?

I'm assuming that if a club were to delete one of those stock files and later decides to add it back in from a local drive, then it would be treated as the club's own file and not a stock file. In this case, it would take up that storage space again (and the procedure I did would not need to be performed for that file).

sort of... there are up to 3 files stored for each file you upload. 1 is the actual file, and the maybe other 2 contain the meta information.

Normally, you would have actual files for each stored in your folder, but for the case of "stock" files, we want to link to the master file and just store the your own copies of the files containing the meta info so that you can control the descriptions and public status independently of other clubs.

In any case, yes you should be good to go and not need to do any kinds of further "fix procedures".

I am going to close this thread now. Let us know if you run into anything else.