OK, after further thought I withdraw my pay-for-play suggestion.

As someone who has helped build the architecture of the Internet for over 10 years, I know full well the primary reason for its success. Openness. If the Internet was closed in any way, most of you would never have heard of it. In fact things like Firewalls threaten the continued growth of the Internet and future applications.

Also, as a citizen of a free country that allows open criticism of its leaders I can't pursue an action that is intended to shield the people here from new input, whether good or bad. Freedom is wonderful, but expensive and sometimes painful. We just have to take the good with the bad.

As for UBB, it's a nice application with great features and I'm glad that we have it. But it doesn't allow for much user control (like a kill file) since that would defeat it's architecture. So I think the only thing we can do is endure the occasional malicious posting just as we endure offensive behavior on the streets we walk on in the real world.

Stimpy is right, the internet is open and shall stay open and we don't see that much trash here, that strict controls are needed.
IP logging is useless anyhow as I explained
earlier in this thread.

Well Peter, IP logging here seems to be having the desired effect - the problem(s) have largely disappeared since it was turned on (and hopefully that isn't only due to the quieter holiday season).

The recent improvement may be due to IP logging, but more likely is a result of the extended vacation(s) of a few notable FTers.

stimpy, Techno wiz kid that you are, are you really suggesting that firewalls should not be used at all? I don't know about your company, but my employer spends a lot of time and money keeping intruders and viruses out of our way. Otherwise, we'd be sitting ducks. So we forgo sites that use Flash and Shockwave. Small price to pay for keeping the newsroom alive and well.

Essxjay, it's a pretty deep point and one that we debate at great length at Internet Engineering Symposia. If you protect your hosts, you don't need firewalls. And while firewalls are good at blocking unwanted traffic, they often block useful traffic as well. Newer applications that expect a free open internet are being stifled by firewalls and NAT (Network Address Translation), and if you stifle applications, you stifle the growth of the Internet.

I can go into much more detail, but not here. If you make it down for the So Cal PIPP we can discuss further.

Stimpy:
As I operated Firewalls myself, I can tell you that you can make most application work
thorugh one, actually we always found a way to do it.

You can build an ALG for any protocol, but it's not scalable and you have to build a new ALG for each protocol. Try H.323 for instance.

Whether it's IP logging, vacation schedules or just the holiday season, I have to agree that FT has been a far lovlier place the past couple of weeks . I find myself actually looking forward to checking in again, rather then dreding it...

kokonutz - I totally agree - peace appears to have broken out.

You are right, but there are toolkits like TIS making it easy but not scalable. Anyhow I don't want to miss the firewalls.

Unfortunately, it will have to wait farther into the future as I am unable to attend the PIPP.

essxjay: Why the Flash paranoia? It seems innocent enough (from a security perspective).

I'm not my company's security expert, eps and so you'd have to pose that question, minus the unnecessary invective, to our systems chief.

What I will tell you is that newspapers are hot targets for hackers. My paper gets a lot of attempted break-ins: sometimes just a few per day, sometimes dozens depending on what we publish on a given day. We cannot chance any breach of firewall integrity due to the proprietary nature of our business. Allowing all 400+ of our news staffers (from senior editors to copyaides) access to the Internet is nearly unheard of in this business because of the risk and we're very careful about what they may access and what plugins are safe to use.

This is to say nothing of VB nasties attached to email, which users can carelessly launch thinking it's legitimate info aimed at them. The Love Bug shut down editing systems all around the country, but not ours.

This was not public information at the time I posted.