GreXXL
Using up a forum’s resources through posting would be way slower and ineffective because it can be seen easily and there are extensions to prevent that. Unlike uploading files without making any posts, that also uses up way more resources, potentially hundreds of GB storage per day from just one user. and there is no good way to prevent that.
I'm not a Flarum plugin dev so I don't really know how they work, but I thought it could be fixed by either:
- allowing you to set an upload limit per user per day, e.g. 5 uploads per day or 100 MB per day
- not storing the uploaded files permanently, instead deleting them if they are not in any post within like 30 minutes of the files being uploaded
And I don't think I can solve that with a cron job running every 30 minutes clearing all unused files, since that could also potentially delete a file that was just uploaded if the timings aligned between the file clear cron job and the user just uploaded an image and hasn't posted it yet.
Also I want all of my users to be able to upload images since it's a very useful forum feature. It literally is allowed here in this forum for every user for this reason, so I don't want to limit that.
If you really want I can demonstrate it by creating a simple bash script to flood this server since there is no limit to how many files I can upload and you probably wouldn't even notice unless there is some sort of alert system like amazon s3 alerts telling you that you are close to the limit if you set one.
