[Mldonkey-users] Server black list

[Stephane Goulet]

> Except that your binary(on/off) suggestion(if I understood you
> correctly) would mean the user can't choose which networks to block.
> Perhaps they want to block all non-routeables except, say, 172.x.x.x.
> Basically what I'm getting at is that having a "block non-routeables"
> option all by itself would be too coarse a control(IMHO).

Yes, of course i agree with you on this, i didn't wanted to mean to kill the
black list, just maybe add a default option for most "regular" users just
like many options with the linux kernel (if it's still like this..) where
you have some stuff enabled/disabled by default and im comments you have:
"if you don't understand/know what this is for, leave it enabled (or
disabled)." So a user who "understands" may disable this options and edit
his black list ruleset. My idea with this option was to help some new users
and "don't bother me with too much nerdish configs" users ;)

> It was a hypothetical example :-)  My point was that whenever you add
> functionality, you should try to make that functionality as useful(or
> flexible) as possible...to a limit.  Too often highly flexible
> software becomes impossible to use.  Look at Cisco IOS for example.
> You can do almost anything with a Cisco router...except you might
> need to spend hours(or worse) learning HOW to do it :)

Ok, well anyway, i saw on slashdot some time ago that a company wanted to
use some kind of peer to peer communication officially.

Yeah, i know about nightmare configs, never played with Ciscos hope i won't
have to ;) It's really annoying when you have to become an "expert" just to
set up a little gizmo that you won't touch probably for years after..

> That said, I think giving the user the ability to add/modify/remove
> args from a CIDR list isn't asking much brain power of them, provided
> it is documented somewhere with a few examples.  Most of the time,
> they'd never really need to touch it anyway, except if they're trying
> to figure out why the heck their mldonkey client won't add a server
> on their private network.

CIDR is quite clean, with very few examples and short explanation most ppl
can use it

> There is a possible danger here to allowing the user to configure the
> blacklist, and that is that they might do silly things like block an
> HUGE range(or ranges.)  I can't off the top of my head think of what
> that would really get them, but beware the fools, for they are
> geniuses at being fools...

I fully agree! ;)