Dangers of allowing HTML?

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thebassman
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Dangers of allowing HTML?

Post by thebassman »

I just installed the FIND mod (RSS feeds, etc), and it would be beneficial to allow HTML. I know there is an HTML Admin Only mod, but I was wonder what the dangers are in just allowing it for the whole board? I really only need to allow a couple codes, like <p>,<br>,<b>,<i>,<u>, <a href...>, etc...
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End of a Shadow
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Post by End of a Shadow »

None really, but if you let <img> slip by you, then things could become a problem. Lately people have been using the <img> tag to use .php extention files for images. Sometimes these images are not images at all and are scripts which can carry malicious data and/or adware/spyware. Whereas phpBB has it built in to only accept certain file extentions for the [img] BBCodes such as .jpg, .gif, and .png and thats it. All others will appear as a broken link text. And good old <img> HTML tags carry no restrictions.

So depends on what tags you are planning to use.
thebassman
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Post by thebassman »

So if I turn it on, can I just specify which ones I would want to be able to use?
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End of a Shadow
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Post by End of a Shadow »

thebassman wrote: So if I turn it on, can I just specify which ones I would want to be able to use?


Yep
thebassman
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Post by thebassman »

But there's not a way to just allow admins to use it other than that 30+ minute mod, right?
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smithy_dll
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Post by smithy_dll »

not sure if it still applies, but when phpBB 2.0.0 was released allowing <i> also allowed naughty things like <iframe>

I'm 90% sure that the javascript parameters like onClick, etc... are disallowed.
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thebassman
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Post by thebassman »

Hmmm... maybe I should just do the mod, then. :evil: Thanks for the advice. :D
Magnotta
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Post by Magnotta »

tags which could cause problems: <img>, <object>, <script>, <table>(allowing this can easily destroy your boards layout), I think you get the idea. If you really need a specific tag, I'd say add a bbcode for it. As well, when using bbcode, if you look at the pages source, the code outputted will be html, you wont see things like [whatever bbcode]text[/bbcode] in the source, so I dont think any RSS feeds should have a problem with it.
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