@Undo I would prefer to see the titles in the post; then you can (in most cases) immediately see whether it is really spam or not, without having to visit the post/look at the alt-text.
@Undo Why does Firestorm have to have a gibberish-string at the end of a URL? e.g. http://firestorm.erwaysoftware.com/flags/view/5/ASZ4MiU - why doesn't /flags/view/5 work?
@Doorknob The idea is that that's a presigned link. /flags/5 works if you're logged in (and soon only if you created the flag), but in /flags/view/x/yyyy, x is the flag ID and yyyy is the password to view it.
Because I figure people don't want everyone being able to see their flags just by guessing URLs.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to be able to create public flags, so everybody doesn't have to type their own {plagiarism / something} flag all the time?
@Undo Is the pecl_http extension enabled on your server? I'm adding a Blaze feature to flag questions, but now I actually read the API-returned JSON, which was not yet necessary to check whether an answer link is valid (I have put an error_message check there, but that is actually not very useful as file_get_contents would return false if it isn't a valid link).
But file_get_contents returns just a lot of UTF-8 junk which json_decode cannot parse. So I'm thinking of using the HttpRequest class (perhaps that solves the problem), and that is included in the pecl_http extension, so that's why I'm asking.
... and by disabling the verification of the certificates, you leave the door open to potential MITM attacks, which SSL/TLS otherwise aims to protect against. DON'T DO THIS! — BrunoMay 14 '12 at 0:46
And that's what happens here. VERIFYPEER has been set to 0.