I don't understand all the huff on that forum about this. It pings to see if you have some ports open. So what?

The "huff" is that this forum is the attempted community fork of Slashdot that even less people care about.

That's typically the signature of malware, not a document server.

I don't mind portscanning per say if its clear you're doing it but a website should never trip a corporate firewall or IDS. We're going to re-rig this code to check the inbound IP against a local DNSBL or something similar and not something that will cause an IDS to shit itself. Generally, if I access a site on a port, I expect return traffic to come back only on that port (excluding protocols like FTP which are explicately multi-port). We officially support tor (and have our own hidden service) and are looking at connecting posts through SpamAssassin to automoderate crap down to -1 (this feature still fairly far out)

What got me upset was the fact that I respect users privacy, and to find out about this behaviour from a bug report notification pissed me off. In /code's defence, at that point, it was basically /., /.JP and Burrapuento as the last three slash sites on the internet so a lot of slashdot specific functionality has creped in over the years before the code drops stopped in 2009, with the documentation for independent sites being a bit stale.

EDIT: I've written a follow up on my SN journal: http://soylentnews.org/~NCommander/journal/277

Exactly my thought. I'm a creature of stubborn habit. I still browse when waiting for things or bored.

I'm just glad to see that a lot of GNAA and other crap has largely stopped.

Still see the Golden Girls spam posts, but, out of all the possible crap you could be clogging the internet up with, the Golden Girls aren't a bad way to go.