No more links on the forums?
The official forums are unpleasant in so many ways. Quite aside from flamers, trolls, Rickrollers, and other assorted Internet demons, there are more serious risks. Although being on a Mac I'm not vulnerable to most of these, the vast majority of WoWers could encounter viruses, trojans, keyloggers, and other such nastyware at the other end of every link in the forums. Although Blizzard put in the interceptor ("You are attempting to visit a page that is not a Blizzard website. It's not our fault if it kills your computer."), most of us are used to automatically clicking past that. So some posters, like Sweet here, think it would be best if no more (external) links were allowed at all in the forums. It looks like Blue agrees (Tyren):
We are always looking to increase security for our players, and while it may be inconvenient, in this case, I think your suggestion is the best way to go, and we will look into doing away with auto links.
It took me a while to figure out what he meant by "auto links," but I'm pretty sure he means the functionality where if you type, for instance, "http://www.wow.com" in a forum post, the forum software turns it into a live link. If this is correct, it means to go to a link in a forum post, people will have to copy the URL and paste it into their address bars. Would that really get fewer people keylogged? Some responders think not, and think it would just irritate folks. I say it can't really be more irritating than that interceptor page. What do you think?
