Sugestion: Enable Flash in BBCODE

[flash=375,50]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v73/curme/curme.swf[/flash]

I want a flash sig! Or even a flash avatar! Groovy!

uh... no. Too many possibilities for problems and abuse.

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
uh... no.

Too many possibilities for problems and abuse.

what he means is flash will not be in the bbcode because google (our sponser) cannot read flash...

its bad for business...

anyway, did you make that flash curme???

thats great!!!

Also flash can be used to collect IPs...and can be used other malicious actions.

Originally posted by dreamlandmafia
Also flash can be used to collect IPs...and can be used other malicious actions.

once we post something here at ATS, SO has our IPs...

what other "malicious" actions are there

sounds scary

Originally posted by they see ALL

its bad for business...

anyway, did you make that flash curme???

thats great!!!

Not from scratch. I tweaked an open source flash from flashkit.com
I'm trying to learn by disecting other people's work. Damn flash is hard!

Originally posted by curme
Not from scratch. I tweaked an open source flash from flashkit.com
I'm trying to learn by disecting other people's work. Damn flash is hard!

hell yeah!!!

i took a course on flash and i thought it would be fun...

besides the fact that the teacher made the course suck, it was SO hard!!!

and it takes too long...

Originally posted by they see ALL

once we post something here at ATS, SO has our IPs...

what other "malicious" actions are there

sounds scary

Of course SO, the other Admins and the Mods would have our IPs, but Im not talking about them, im talking about the people that would USE the Flash in sigs and avatars. Flash can be used to collect our IPs and send them to the person.

Flash can also be used to execute code embeded within...

Originally posted by dreamlandmafia

Of course SO, the other Admins and the Mods would have our IPs, but Im not talking about them, im talking about the people that would USE the Flash in sigs and avatars. Flash can be used to collect our IPs and send them to the person.

Flash can also be used to execute code embeded within...

damn...

flash sucks...

o0o well, i love flash games...

I wonder if this request has a chance to be revisited. It has been six years since this was requested. Security has come a long way. Does ATS Admin still consider a BBCode for Flash a security risk? or are the security risks and Google incompatibility from 2004 still a concern in 2010?

Aren't youtube and google videos flash programs?

Originally posted by Deaf Alien
Aren't youtube and google videos flash programs?

Yes. If you run the flashblock add-on for firefox, you'll get a button that appears where the videos are in youtube etc. Then you have to click the flashblock button to get it to play.

I avoided running flash at all on my PC as long as I could (I didn't install flash until 2008), but there were a few cases where I needed it and youtube videos are one of them, so flashblock turned out to be a nice solution, I can watch youtube videos, but I don't get epileptic seizures from the flashier blinking stuff written in flash.

By 2008 they had removed some of the swiss-cheese like security holes in flash, but the security problems with flash persisted as the following 2008 article indicates, so I think SO has a point, too much risk and potential for abuse:

www.securityfocus.com...

until Web site developers rebuild their Flash multimedia with the latest authoring tools, the older files still present on their company's Web sites could be used by fraudsters to attack the site's users. Other security researchers attending the CanSecWest conference agreed that the problem is going to be hard to fix. "There is no easy solution and that is concerning, " said Iván Arce, chief technology officer for Core Security Technologies. "The broken code is created by the authoring tools, so it is not going to get fixed anytime soon."

Flash runs as an application. You can embed plenty of malicious code into it.
People don't need to click or interact with any part of the .swf file either. You can simply run said code from the OnLoad function.

With a little bit of creativity, there's little you cannot do with flash. Though I think flash would have been neat from a creative perspective, I personally support SO's reasons for not allowing it!

It's more problems than it's worth IMHO.

IRM