I'm confused on how the new Pictures & Albums stuff works...

[Jaxel]

I dont want the album page to only show the most recent 7 days of updates, I want it to show ALL albums. So I set the "Recent Album Update Days" to 365. Then I rebuilt the "Recently Updated Albums" counter...

However, my pictures & albums section is still not showing the albums. How do I fix this?

http://www.8wayrun.com/album.php

[Wayne Luke]

It only shows recently updated albums. As albums are added to they will appear. If you want to show all albums on a page, there is an addon at www.vbulletin.org for this purpose.

[Jaxel]

You mean it doesn't automatically list albums with new pictures within the past "Album Update Days"? Then whats the point? Seriously, what were you guys thinking?

[Jaxel]

Hmm... why would you have a new table just for album updates? Wouldn't it be easier to simply crawl the database of albums and pictures and just list the albums in order based on the last post time of an image in that album?

The way you have it set up, not only makes it so that right now there are ZERO updated albums; but it lets people abuse the system by uploading a picture, and then deleting a picture just to update their album update time and get moved to the front of the list.

[Jaxel]

I see what the problem is... in functions_albums.php, you guys are constantly using "$vbulletin->bf_ugp_albumpermissions['canalbum']"

This is fine, however, NONE of my primary usergroups have the canalbum permission. This permission is reserved to secondary usergroups. I have a secondary usergroup called "premium users"; for people who buy into a premium subscription fee on my forums. It is a secondary usergroup so that these album permissions do not affect the abilities of their primary usergroup; which could be moderators, supermoderators or probationary users.

The permission check should check all the permissions of a user, not just the permissions of their primary usergroup. This is an oversight in the code that you should fix; or explain how we can fix it ourselves... WITHOUT giving album permissions to every group. I did say something about this issue back during the beta, but I didn't know as much about VB as I do now, so I couldn't figure out that it was a fault of the permission checking... so you guys ignored me.

I just deleted the two references to "$vbulletin->bf_ugp_albumpermissions['canalbum']" from my functions_albums.php and now everything works fine. (except of coursse, the OBVIOUS method that users can do to game the system and always have their album in the front; which i explained in the post above this one) I'm hoping you guys will remove the reference to "$vbulletin->bf_ugp_albumpermissions['canalbum']" in your future upgrades; so that I, and other customers don't have to keep doing this themselves.

Using "$userinfo['permissions']['albumpermissions']" is more than enough to handle these permissions without causing error; and it also checked a user's secondary usergroup. I don't know why you guys were using both.

[Jaxel]

I found another bug in the pictures and album stuff...

If a user used to have album permissions, and then they lose it; their entire album goes in the gutter. It still shows up, but no one can view it. Returns a permission denied error to every user; even users who have permission to view albums.

You guys seriously need to rewrite the entire album section.

[Jaxel]

So... any responses?

[feldon23]

Only that vBulletin Albums is an extremely underdeveloped part of vBulletin. It's almost a tease in its current form, not a final product. I hate to say it, because I'd love to ditch PhotoPost.

You'll find the biggest bug with the Albums feature is that photos require an albumid. If you leave out the albumid in the image link, the photo won't display. This is a huge issue.