BIQ/BIX/BIC Files now attachable!

[Quintillus]

With a bit of help from The_J, I'm pleased to announce that BIQ, BIX, and BIC files are now directly attachable to the forums, including the downloads database. No more need to put the file in a .zip archive just to share a save that you have a question about!

Admittedly it falls in the "slightly longer after release than would have been ideal" bucket, but I'm sure at least five forum members will find it useful, most without even realizing it didn't used to be possible.

(From a historical standpoint, my best guess as to why it wasn't allowed before is that in the Vanilla editor, scenarios weren't compressed, so requiring them to be compressed saved enough space and bandwidth to make a difference when the game was new. At some point we passed a point where that probably didn't make sense as a requirement anymore, but the old ways stuck around)

 

[vmxa]

What happened to the icon that shows a save is attached to the thread. Anyway good news is good to get.

 

[Quintillus]

What happened to the icon that shows a save is attached to the thread. Anyway good news is good to get.

Which icon do you mean exactly? For within a post, an attached biq/bix/bic will still show as an attachment, like in this post I made yesterday, but I'm drawing a blank on a thread-level equivalent.

 

[Quintillus]

When I go to a sub forum such as cross-platform and I see a list of threads there use to be a icon that alerted the user to the fact that a file was attached. I did not have to open that thread and go through all the post to see, if say a save was attached. Currently I cannot tell that you attached anything, until I open the thread and scroll down and encounter you post with an attachment.

If I have made a post in a thread, I can see my icon and know I have made a post. I use to be able to tell, if any attachments were in a given thread, now I cannot, until I open the thread and scroll through it.

I believe that feature went away when we switched from vBulletin to XenForo, or maybe XenForo 1 to XenForo 2. The Internet Archive confirms that it was present on vBulletin:

But if there's an option for in in XenForo, I am unaware of it.

I'm curious what the use case is for it these days? My general thought was that Downloads Database should have subsumed most of the "I have a creation to share" use case that the attachment icon may have covered before, and that the thread title/description should be adequate for "Help me figure out what to do in this SAV" and similar threads that have non-image attachments. Or did the icon take you directly to the attachment even if it was not in the first post?

Either way, I doubt we will be seeing its return.

 

[vmxa]

Yeah that is what I remember. I figured it was gone with one of the updates.