Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I am not sure if this would be the right forum but I have looked into other potential candidates as "General Discussion" and "Private EN" in the admin section and they didn't seem right.

I have received a PM asking me to update a link or rather to upload again the document that is linked to (Tutorial thread viewtopic.php?f=74&t=49294 and Arineckaig's uploaded document http://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/do ... p?id=13711). The strange thing is that the link to the uploaded document works for me. So I replied to the request that he should better check whether he is logged in when clicking on the link. I remember forums where you need to be logged in to have access to uploaded material, though I never came across problems with downloads in our forum and I am quite sure that I have downloaded files being logged out.

I surely don't want to upload Arineckaig's document, just to please this user. I am not the author of this document, but if I upload it I somehow pretend to be the author and that doesn't feels right for me. (And as a German I still remember that some of the goverment's ministers have resigned due to such cases not too long ago.) The second thought was to contact Arineckaig and ask him to re-upload it. But how should I explain this to him as after all the link works for me?

Meanwhile this user contacted me again and repeated that the download link doesn't work for him. I looked at the link more closely and saw that it refers to the old forum domain user.services.openoffice.org. I have changed this now using the rel BB-Code. I did the same for the first link to Villeroy's post (in the last section "Other threads related with MRI", if you want to have a look by yourself). The interesting part is that all links were showing in the link text the short form viewtopic.php?... and only the status line in the browser revealed the domain to which the link actually refers to. Now after editing the post the visible text shows the user.services.openoffice.org domain directly. Most probably related with the fact that I use now the "new" forum.openoffice.org domain to access the forum and back then in March 2012 when I wrote the article I was still using the old domain.

Well, things get clearer for me. That user has 10 posts, so I thought he is pretty new, but actually he joined the forum in November 2007. Chances are that he is still browsing the forum with the old URL and that's the reason. Hm, rather not. As a quick test for the old domain showed that the browser is redirected to the new domain.

Anyways, I will tell him to try again after my change to the rel linking method and will report back here about the results.

Additionally your advice would be helpful for me regarding copyright and terms of use. The Survival Guide links to http://www.openoffice.org/license.html, which rather seems to refer to the Openoffice.org software code and the documentation. And it is unclear for me, if the PDL and LGPL(v3) are also relevant for the forum. The note about the Creative Commons license that might apply in some cases doesn't help for clarity. So in case of our forum I tend to fall back on common sense which tells me to ask the original author if I am about to do something with his or her intellectual property. But from a legal point of view the intellactual rights for the content are handed over to the community. And if I can't reach the original author anymore, I would be allowed to re-upload the file.

Now, after thinking about this, this seems to be a very similar case to the discussion about users deleting their own posts. I'll check if I can find this old discussion.

I can't guess what the problem is with the link.

As far as IP on the forum, I don't know of any clear statement or policy. I believe there used to be a specific statement in the old (Sun/Oracle) TOU, to the effect that anything posted was unrestricted (I don't remember the wording at all) and that the user bore the responsibility if they posted or attached anything that was under license. It was my impression that the old TOU were specifically designed to include user content posted to a website; the Apache TOU seems to be specific to developers contributing code.

I agree with you: I would not want to take responsibility for providing a copy of someone else's file without express permission to do so, for the ethical reasons you already mentioned, but on top of that, I don't want to deal with fetching files for people. The forum should handle that; if there's a problem with forum then we should fix the problem, not go around it. If the problem is on the user's end, then it's their responsibility.

acknak wrote:if there's a problem with forum then we should fix the problem, not go around it.

+1.
But the file has been deleted it seems I get this message:
The selected attachment does not exist anymore.
Do you have the post where it is linked?

I don't think that logging in is mandatory to download a file.

Hm, it is getting strange.

In the tutorial thread in question Introduction into object inspection with MRI I see now that the links at the end of thread have changed (maybe caused by an automatic processing in the backend MySQL forum database?).

I am sure that I changed the first link to The same kind of change (the title of the thread -- to that the link points -- replaced the link text with the numerical forum and thread IDs) has happened to the next two following links. But I am sure I made a manual change only to the first link, the next two I kept as they were before That was on purpose to give the fellow volunteers the change to compare and inspect the differences.
I guess a background process checks the new posts (including edited old postings) and replaces all direct references to forum.openoffice.org/en/forum or user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum with their counterparts using relative links with [rel]. Usually this makes sense as it avoids hardcoding of the server domain into the post.

Hagar Delest wrote:But the file has been deleted it seems I get this message:
The selected attachment does not exist anymore.

Hagar, this is the same message that the one who send me a PM receives. But for me it is different. I could download the file yesterday and also now after I have changed the file link to use the [rel] code:
Could it be that I am the only one for whom the link works ???

rudolfo wrote:Hm, it is getting strange.

No, it's me.
When I find such links, I change them to rel BBCode and add the name of the post for better readability. It can also help when you search something (sometimes keywords ring a bell).

rudolfo wrote:Could it be that I am the only one for whom the link works ???

Seems so.
Can you send me the file by PM and I'll will upload it again in the tutorial (tomorrow evening).

by PM, rudolfo wrote:I was trying to find the post in which the uploaded file was included. But without success. But at least I know now why: Arineckaig has sent me his file as a suggestion to include after he saw my Tutorial thread about MRI. So I had only the download link, but not the post where this link was in included.

This is it!
Since the link was in a PM (I guess), the link is available only for the addressee. So nobody could get that download.
I've uploaded it in the related post so it should be fine now.

Sure, it must be like that. Ironically I have received a PM by Arineckaig where he states, that he has just like me no problem to download the file. But it is all clear now. He has the PM with the download link in his outbox and I have it in the inbox, so the link is reachable for both of us, but only for us two.

Thanks Hagar for solving it. I have informed the person that PMed me about this thread, so typically he is already about to give the new download link a try. As soon as I see the download count going up, I will mark this thread as solved.