More flexible duration option in web UI about send

[rsyring]

Do you have a use case where a more specific expiry time like you describe would be very much desirable? Because I do think the current implementation is 'good enough' for most cases.

In my case, I was sending the document late on a Thursday evening. I wanted to give the recipient two business days to download the document, so wanted to enter "4 days". As it is, I used 7 days and I guess that was fine. So I agree with you it wasn't really "very much desirable." I was just being pedantic. :)

I didn't personally think the text box (integer) + select box (units) would be more confusing to the average web user. It seems like a pretty simple UI to me, although I'm not a UI expert.

The simple/advance option also seems like it could work nicely. Although more development work needed there.

Thanks for the dialogue and congrats on your project hitting the top of HN.

[pirate]

@rsyring you may already be aware, but you can set the EXPIRE_TIMES_SECONDS config option to customize the preset options in the UI dropdown, e.g.

EXPIRE_TIMES_SECONDS=3600,86400,604800,2592000,31536000 (the first value e.g. 3600 is used as the UI default)

You do have to preset these options ahead of time, but you can add as many as you want to have more granular choices than just the default 300,3600,86400,604800.

This doesn't solve your request directly, but it may be helpful to people arriving on this ticket from Google wondering how to customize that dropdown (as I did),

[rsyring]

I guess a different option would be a single text box with the ability to enter values like "30m", "12h", "3d". Same as ffsend uses. Might not be as intuitive for non-technical users though.

[timvisee]

I think this is done to keep the interface as simple as possible. Adding more free input fields may become confusing or annoying to use (quickly).

Do you have a use case where a more specific expiry time like you describe would be very much desirable? Because I do think the current implementation is 'good enough' for most cases.

Also, would adding more duration options by default in the drop down be good enough?

[mfrieswyk]

I agree that having preset options is simpler and more than likely good enough for most cases.

Perhaps adding a toggle to the right for advanced/custom duration options could be a happy medium?

[timvisee]

Yes, that sounds like a fair medium.

[maskmanlucifer]

Can i work on this issue.
I have read all the above discussion and i can implement something hybrid (Simple + Flexible).
This will take no more space than the current dropdown is taking.
Link this is how ui will look after
embeding select box in input field.

[timvisee]

@maskmanlucifer Sure. Give it a shot!

[maskmanlucifer]

Okk thank you i'll work on this.

[maskmanlucifer]

I have another user experience improvement suggestion.

Problem :
For now if i am sending more than one files through one link.
Then the downloaded folder will be zipped.
But if we consider all the scenario's like --

1. Non-tech user -- Not much experienced with zip/unzip folder,files.
2. Smart phone user -- Most of the unzipping solutions start with downloading files app.
   From my experience most of the users share files on smart phones ( I am college student and quite often i send assignments , or some xyz pdf's to my friends on whatsapp).
   Here "send" makes sharing multiple files easier by sharing only a link to all friends but if they will be on smart phones
   then this will be painful task to get real files from downloaded zipped folder.

Solution :
There can be a download icon ahead of each file on download page along with a download all button at the bottom.
So that Instead of downloading a zip folder a user can download pdf's seprately.

Now for lesser number of files above solution is quite good bcoz i'll rather click few icons to download pdf's
Rather than downloading zipped folder and extracting content from that folder.
For large number of files both clicking icons multiple times and unzipping folder will take same effort.
One more thing is giving icon ahead of each file gives a sense of selectivity like say i combined 4 files intended to be downloaded by 4 different users then they can download which pdf they want not whole folder.

What do you think about this ????.

[timvisee]

For now if i am sending more than one files through one link.
Then the downloaded folder will be zipped.
But if we consider all the scenario's like --

1. Non-tech user -- Not much experienced with zip/unzip folder,files.

2. Smart phone user -- Most of the unzipping solutions start with downloading files app.
   From my experience most of the users share files on smart phones ( I am college student and quite often i send assignments , or some xyz pdf's to my friends on whatsapp).
   Here "send" makes sharing multiple files easier by sharing only a link to all friends but if they will be on smart phones
   then this will be painful task to get real files from downloaded zipped folder.

Solution :
There can be a download icon ahead of each file on download page along with a download all button at the bottom.
So that Instead of downloading a zip folder a user can download pdf's seprately.

Now for lesser number of files above solution is quite good bcoz i'll rather click few icons to download pdf's
Rather than downloading zipped folder and extracting content from that folder.
For large number of files both clicking icons multiple times and unzipping folder will take same effort.
One more thing is giving icon ahead of each file gives a sense of selectivity like say i combined 4 files intended to be downloaded by 4 different users then they can download which pdf they want not whole folder.

What do you think about this ????.

I'd definitely like that, but: this is currently hard to implement, and would require significant file handling/cryptography changes.

The current implementation (with a ZIP archive) was likely chosen because it was easy to implement on top of the single-file upload system.

There are some other problems when implementing such a system:

• Browsers don't properly support initiating multiple downloads
• Download limits are weird with multiple files

A nice middle ground could be to handle ZIP extracting within the browser itself, though I don't know how good such thing will work.

I don't want to go through the trouble to implement this because I sadly don't have time for it. This is something to discuss in a different issue anyway.

[maskmanlucifer]

I will create a new issue for this so that in future you or someone else want's to make those changes can find this new issue.
One more thing i am kind of beginner to make those UI changes , after going through the code part of that drop down i realised that creating new text field and drop down will involve few calculation and it's very simple in current UI.
Because number of seconds are simply pre-calculated and placed and grabbed from value of options.
So for now i am not working on this issue :(
you can add above comment in my newly created issue so anyone can get ideas about implementation complexity of above suggestion (ZIP one).

[mythsmith]

@maskmanlucifer how is this work going? did you open a fork/pr?