Broken GZ file extension; also missing TGZ.

The .GZ extension is listed as valid, but files ending with .TAR.GZ seem to be disallowed ("invalid file type"). This seems to be a bug.

Also, as a suggestion, I think that .TGZ should be added to the list; although .TAR.GZ works fine it would be convenient, at least. Another good one to add might be .BZ2, personally I perfer bzipping over gzipping for compression.

.tar.bz2 too.

.tbz2 as well.

Hrm, any more? .7z would be neat, although not so common. .rar perhaps.

it would also be nice to be able to attach .abw (abiword) and .ood (openoffice.org), since they're cross platform and free. If people insist on posting .doc, then I insist on using abiword myself when necessary instead of the microsoft format.

I agree; if the extension parsing was working correctly (maybe it is, but there seems to be something wrong since .tar.gz is not working even though .gz is a valid extension) then .gz and .bz2 would both cover .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 as well. And .rar would be very useful.

Hmm but then the list gets kind of long. Personally, I'm all for scrapping .doc altogether and allowing .ps, .pdf, .rtf, .txt, and .htm[l] for document types; that should cover a lot of it and any one of those should be easy enough to generate. Me, I'm pretty paranoid anyway; I have VisualH4X0R turned off but .doc files still give me the willies.

One thing is; disallowed filenames can be easily transmitted by archiving them. So anything that isn't allowed explicitly can still be posted, which is good. I think that a good selection of archive/compression extensions should be the most important there.

*nods* but it's inconvenient for viewers to unarchive them. Many machines at work etc. are banned from doing so.

what exactly is the point of only allowing some extensions? they are fairly useless, i would think its better to just deny .msi/.exe (or any other extension that can do an install be itself) to prevent accidental installs of crap software

It's the java security ideal. You might not list everything it shouldn't do, so you list everything it should be able to do instead.

In addition to security, it's also a mild deterrent against things like, say, using DevShed to host your MP3 or AVI files or whatever. Sure mods could pick that kind of stuff up and remove it but in an environment like Devshed there's no real need to allow every non-"dangerous" file type conceivable, and it would be a fair amount of work for mods to track that.