File Manager-file organization keeps changing

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.