William Warby

Yep. In this particular case though, it was something my users pretty much demanded of me. My users are all senior managers and elected government officials who generally don't stray from MS Office and email on their PCs and they're not the most patient group of individuals. Explaining to them that they had to press a button to insert a tag into the post content to avoid an error page when posting their documents on IPB was not really an option. IPB isn't the ideal solution for my particular usage case but it was cheap and easy, and I don't think there's anything on the market that's closer to what we needed. Thanks for your help ;)

Haha :) No, I'd cautiously label myself as an expert PHP programmer - I've been writing it on and off for about 6 years. I knew I'd be able to hack the source, I'd just prefer not to for reasons of maintainability - I got myself locked into an old version of IPB before because I hacked it so much that it was too much effort to port all those hacks from version to version. We learn by our mistakes!

Thanks Wolfie! I'd actually just set about doing the exact same thing, but I'd only noticed one of the three places where you commented out so it's a good job I had you looking at it too :) It's a very easy hack so I've just made a note on what I need to remember to do with each new release - I'll still hope for an actual feature since this hack doesn't take account of whether or not there are any attachments and I don't want to start rewriting a bunch of code to check for that and produce a different error message, but for now this suits my purposes well enough ;)

Yes, I realise that, but I'm in the unfortunate position of having to deal with a set of very IT-illiterate users that are barely able to grasp the concept of an Internet forum. Making them press a button to insert the attachment tag into the post is not user friendly because they won't understand the point of doing it, and I'd have to train every new user to press the button except where they have written a description of the attachment. I can see I'm onto a loser with this request and it's because I'm using IPB in a way that it wasn't really intended to be used - as a poor man's document collaboration tool rather than a discussion forum. But it doesn't seem like there would be any harm in having a setting to not require a post text when there are attachments, and it sounds like a very simple addition. Would it help if I begged?!

My implementation of IPB is on a corporate Intranet where it's only purpose is for users to post draft documents so that other users can comment on them. They typical scenario is that they post a new topic with no text and just an attachment and then the replies start flowing, but the "post" is a mandatory field with no option to change it. This is a bad fit for my usage scenario. In 2.x you could trick the system with a space character but that doesn't work in 3.x. I'd like an option to allow blank posts when there are attachments present. For the time being, I'll try to implement this myself by hacking the source code because I need it to work right now.