Warn users when upoaded file size exceeded?

Hi,

I have a report from a user who – in the step #2 of the submission process – tried to upload his initial submission PDF which for whatever reason had more than 28MB. The uploaded file size limit of our PHP was set to 2MB though, and the upload did not succeed.

So far so good, but after the file upload failed, no error message was displayed to the user and the whole submission process silently reverted to step #1, which quite confused the user. As he was uploading from the other side of the globe, I repeated the submission process from my local machine and observed identical results.

Is this the standard behaviour of the OJS or did I somehow misconfigure OJS?

If the former is true, would someone be so kind and point me to files which I could change? I have now increased the file upload size to 64MB to be sure that this kind of error occurs with very low probablility (ours is a technical journal and typical submissions are around 1MB), but I really would like to keep our authors’ files in reasonable limits by going down to let’s say 4MB file size limit and displaying a warning for oversize files, forcing them to either prepare a proper PDF or to submit their hi-resolution images as a supplementary material.

Thanks for help.

– jan

Hi @jprk,

OJS isn’t particularly helpful in this regard, but we’re using a new uploader for OJS 3.0 and OMP that provides more helpful warnings. We likely won’t back-port this to OJS 2.4.x, but for now, I’d suggest adding a note to your submission checklist with a suggested maximum file size.

Some users have increased their server upload limits and are successfully working with files far larger than 28MB, but users will have to be patient, as the upload process doesn’t have a progress indicator (something else that the new upload tool improves).

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Dear @asmecher,

if the problem is solved in 3.0 then it’s okay. Thanks for the idea of adding a note to submission checklist, this is more likely to work than a note placed into instructions for authors.

– jan