Your problem is likely that your 'apache' process (apache, nobody, www, or whatever you have it set up as) can't read the files provided by your users.
The way around it is either have them change it manually, as you have, or get your ftp server to do it.
You'll need to look at 'umask' which translates to 'what permissions I create files with.'
It'll depend on which FTP server you're using, but here's an example page for Pro-FTP which is a popular one :
http://www.castaglia.org/proftpd/doc...WTO-Umask.html
Slick.
