Serious Flaw In Membership Levels

This has been addressed before, but a search couldn't find the thread. Has anything been done?

On smaller sites, there may be a need to restrict the number of photos or other items a member can post.

We're allowing Standard members to post 50 photos with a time limit of "0" which means 50 photos maximum. For most of our members, this is plenty.

However, if the member reaches the limit and decides to replace some or all photos, s/he may have none in the album but access is still denied.

It seems that the counter is NOT reset when photos are deleted.

The site I'm working on has almost a thousand members and we're receiving complaints daily that members can't post new photos.

Can we please get a fix to overcome this issue. It's a premium site.

Bumping this for interest. Haven't had issue but can definitely see it would be problematic.

Matter of fact, in a streamlined, logical platform set up if someone tried posting and was at their limit an alert should pop up saying

"Sorry, you've reached the maximum photos allowed for your membership level. Please upgrade your membership or delete some undesired photos and try again. Thanks for being a valued & appreciated member of our social community"

Remember, its all about keeping members happy while encouraging them to upgrade memberships where applicable.

JohnK42 is correct it needs prompt resolution because members are a rare commodity in today's social media deluge and they need to be well informed, assisted and encouraged whenever possible. 

Thanks @neotekcorp. All they get is an unfriendly message saying "Access Denied".

I've sent you a PM.

Hi, I'm new to Dolphin and still setting up my site so I don't have any answers for you but I find this post very interesting. I'm curious - have you been submitting tickets to them to fix this and nothing has been done? It's been a few months since you posted. I imagine it would be horrible to be running a network with no fix to this.

Just curious about Dolphin support and it's good to know about this issue before I launch. I'll definitely take it into consideration and watch to see if it's resolved.

Also curious if anyone has found a way to change the Access Denied message to something more informative? Direct them to a way to upgrade memberships? That's one of the things I was going to search around for on this forum because it's one of the things I hate most about my website.

Sorry to hijack your thread a bit, hope your issue has been resolved by now!

I haven't put a ticket in because I don't think it's a bug. It's more the thinking logic of the Boonex developers and it's a request, which usually fall on deaf ears. I've got several questions out there like this one and most are unanswered. There's only two Boonex staff who infrequently visit the forum and do the best to answer questions when they do. It's not as if the forum is busy. Sometimes there are only a dozen or so new posts a week, yet many go unanswered for weeks or forever. Some are answered by people like myself who are struggling.

It's hit and miss here, so why would I bother putting in tickets I ask? If Andrew Boone was half serious and took time to read the posts on this forum, Dolphin could become one mighty fine product. However, if you look at what has happened in a programming sense in the past year, you and I are never going to see  much change in our lifetime.

We were told that the research on UNA would flow through to Dolphin, but there hasn't been any proof of that anywhere in the past two years. 

The same thing happened with a script called OSCommerce. The owner became complacent and the script went stale. A few enterprising guys snatched it, called it ZenCart and converted it into the finest eCommerce store on the Net. That was a wake-up call for OSCommerce and now both scripts continue to improve out of sight.

I firmly believe the same thing needs to happen with Dolphin because the poor coding, weird structure and shocking after sales service don't do the product justice.

I'd like to be more positive, but it isn't easy.

Each one of your points is a valid rebuke. Your frustration is shared by many of us, John. 
@neotekcorp, your suggestion for an alternate to the ice cold "Access Denied" is an excellent idea!

Yes, it is easy to do.  You need to learn more about Dolphin as this is a basic part of maintaining a Dolphin site.  Language keys are used throughout Dolphin.  Newton made a post about this so just search the forums for "Access Denied" to find your solution.

In Admin/Settings/Language Settings type Access Denied in the Filter box.

You should receive three (3) listings:

I haven't tested it, but my guess is it will be Item 2 _INVALID ROLE

Click Edit and enter the text you would like to appear.

Always remember what was there originally just in case you need to put things back the way they were.

John I'd consider a logical issue that means your users are locked out of their photo albums to be a bug, even if it's not causing a crash or anything. Thanks for the info.

Geek Girl I know I need to learn more about Dolphin, that's what I'm doing here on the forums thanks.

I've looked through the documentation but it doesn't go in depth unless I'm missing a further level of documentation. I've looked at all the tutorials I find online. I'm just now getting into the forums but the responses of "you need to learn more, this is basic stuff" aren't helpful. I know it's basic, this website does not explain things and it's very slow going to piece it together.

Anyone know of anywhere that explains the customization of this site to newer people? Even the dashboard says "change your privacy settings here" and then takes you to the language keys page with no further explanation. (I know how to customize that, not asking, just saying it's not very user-friendly).

Perhaps it is a membership level issue and not a language key issue; what I thought the issue was, was the Access Denied not being clear enough to members.  You set first the allowed to use Photos in the membership level along with how many uploads in a time period.  Members that are allowed to upload won't see the Access Denied message and those who aren't allowed will.

Oh wait, that was your question: "Also curious if anyone has found a way to change the Access Denied message to something more informative? Direct them to a way to upgrade memberships?"

Now let me do a search of the forum and see what shows up.  Wow, the post I mentioned from Newton showed up.  The forum is full of information on Dolphin.  You might have to phrase your search in different ways but there is a lot of information here.

https://www.boonex.com/forums/topic/ACCESS-DENIED-Don-t-you-just-hate-it-.htm

Getting back to the original post, this is not a bug - it's a quirk!

• When you allow an event to take place in membership levels, it becomes a link which opens a box with additional options:
• Number of Allowed Actions
• Number of Actions Reset - in hours

This is very handy for lots of things including photos and Videos, it applies to messages, comments etc as well. 

I want the counter reset when photos and videos are deleted, but what if the same applied to messages?

If I allocated 5 messages per day as many sites do, a member could send 5 messages, delete them and send 5 more. It would defeat the purpose. Thus, I consider it a flaw because photos and videos should be treated differently.

As I don't restrict messages, I'd be happy if the count for all items to be adjusted.

AlexT or Leonid, can you supply a code snippet to change this?

I have given up moaning about this very subject.  The posts go back to the begging of time on this subject yet nothing is being done. Even spoke with Andrew on this but I may as well have been talking to a wall.

The entire membership module if you can call it that is a shambles add to that payments and you may as well just employ a could of office staff 24/7 to run the memberships manaually.  Thats pretty much whatIhave to do. Only I cant aford the 24/7 staff so I get very little sleep.  Two years on and I am tired, so very tired. Physically and of Dolphin