Wizcrafts - 6:27 pm on May 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

Brett said: "This is important to just listen to let the members give suggestions here."

I suppose that you could allow your moderators to appoint their own sub-moderators, whose job is, or includes, checking out links submitted in moderated posts. They could also perform standard mod duties while the main moderator is offline. This would take pressure off of the long-time mods who might be overrun checking out links and URLs.

Furthermore, if somebody is appointed to check out links and URLs, they should already know how to protect their computers from malware and exploits. A combination of using a Linux computer, or Firefox with the NoScript add-on, plus a limited privileges user account, as I do, makes it less dangerous to investigate unknown links. There is also a well known online tool that security oriented folks like me use - to display the content of any web page in plain text. It also gives the IP of that site and helps reveal if a 302 redirect has been employed on a compromised website.

So you can see, a moderator, or sub-moderator will have to adjust to the task of verifying links, both for our safety and his or hers.