New Forum v. Firefox+Macintosh, message, attachment

[Steven Schweda]

   Normally, when I'm using HP's Secure Web Browser V1.1-12 on my
HP/COMPAQ Professional Workstation XP1000 running HP's OpenVMS V8.3, the
only way I can post anything on HP's wonderfully shiny new forum system
is as an attachment.  Fine.  Today I'm running Firefox 3.6.20 on a Mac
(PowerPC, Mac OS X 10.5.8), where the normal Post Message edit window
actually works.  And then I tried to Post a message with an attachment
(C source file, "tail.c", about 37KB), and that failed.  If there was an
informative error message. then I missed it.  I was returned to what
looked to me like the same "Reply to Message" form, with my message body
still in the edit window, but with the Attachment hole empty again.

   My question: Has anyone posted a reply with some message text and an
attachment from a Mac?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Steven:

That's very interesting.  I can reproduce your bug using Mac OX X (10.8.0) running FireFox 6.0.1.  I tried posting two attachements ---  the first one simply named 'myattach' and the second named 'myattach.c'.

I toggled the attactments and hit "post".  I was returned the original posting form minus the attachments (as if I had never applied them).  There was no error returned to indicate the failure, either.

I'll try adding 'myattach.txt' here, now.

Regards!

...JRF...

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi (again) Steven:

So it would appear that the rules-of-engagement in this forum are to summarily reject attachements that aren't suffixed with '.txt'.  Sounds to me like a nod to Windows users.

ADDENDUM: We'll try the next obvious choice, a '.pdf'.  This attachment should be the stat() manpage of HP-UX.

...and so '.txt. or '.pdf' make for acceptable attachments, though one isn't warned otherwise!

Regards!

...JRF...

[Steven Schweda]

> So it would appear [...]

   Thanks for shooting the trouble.  I might never have guessed the key.

   My usual question in this situation would be, "Who writes this
dreck?", but we already have an answer to that one.  (And to the
follow-up, "Who'd buy this dreck?".)

   I think that I may have stopped being seriously annoyed by this
seriously lame forum software.  Now I've reached the stage where it's
just very tiring.  Well on its way to "not worth the bother".

[Stephan.]

Just as add on info

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Community-Feedback-Suggestions/Extend-allowed-attachments/m-p/4805585#M557

They allow the following extension:

- png

- jpg

- bmp

- bat

- zip

- txt

- sh / ksh

- doc,docx

- ppt,pptx

- xls, xlsx

[Dennis Handly]

>Thanks for shooting the trouble.  I might never have guessed the key.

I guess you haven't read all of the topics in this board recently and since it replaced the BSC forum 1+ years ago.  ;-)

If Kevin_Paul doesn't see this topic, you could drop him a PM asking for new suffixes.

>There was no error returned to indicate the failure, either.

That's not a good design.  Not even a red message indicating you may be attaching a virus or spam?  ;-)

>ADDENDUM: We'll try the next obvious choice, a '.pdf'.

Now that you have successfully experimented, you might as well delete your attachments.

(Hmm, it gets real upset if you try attaching an empty file.)

[Steven Schweda]

> They allow the following extension:

> [...]

   I'll bite.  Why the limitation?  Who cares what the file name is?

Calling nonsense like this "mickey-mouse" is the kind of thing which

would give Mickey Mouse a bad name.

> That's not a good design.

   Fits right in, though.

[Dennis Handly]

>Why the limitation?  Who cares what the file name is?

Windows does.  ;-)

Prevent .exe, .bat from spreading viruses.

(The ITRC forum didn't like .zip if  you were using IE.)

[Stephan.]

>Prevent .exe, .bat from spreading viruses

Great, what about the so rare virus inside of office products and pictures? ;-)

A binary scanner would be much better, but if I remember correct Hein van den Heuvel did already suggest this somewhere.