It's not paranoid at all. It's perfectly sensible. In addition to techno nasties mentioned earlier, your website may be open to people posting adverts, porn, links to undesirable material etc. At one level, this is a pain. At another level, the material may be illegal.

It all very much depends on what you are trying to accept and the scale of your problem. If you are running a small newsgroup, you can isolate content before letting it go or provide a mechanism for users to report content that they don't like. You can then operate an auto-exclusion rule when three people object to the content. If you are setting up the next version of Flickr then you will need to add some technology into the mix.

You can automate the approval of most text content if you are able to compare it to examine it. The problem is that humans are endlessly inventive when it comes to spellings of Ciali5 etc.

In reply to Re: (OT) accepting user files online by inman
in thread (OT) accepting user files online by leocharre

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.