Hello guys and gals, this is my first post here so be gentle.

I’m giving all the bored programmers out there a project here, I’ll just be giving some background first, please bear with me.

I’m a moderator on a fairly large forum, critical security. Like most other forums of that size there’s always someone trying to hack us. Well… one user did find a new flaw in IPB (which has been reported BTW) in the PMing system. Essentially this allowed him to run JavaScript when the recipient reads the PM. He sent me a PM with JavaScript which sends my session ID off to a remote page. He also had it alert the text “hacked”, which told me immediately what he’d done. I quickly changed me password and logged out. It was too late, he was in as me and there was nothing I could do.

Since he now had moderator rights he could warn people he disliked, remove topics and generally cause mayhem. At the same time I was desperately trying to wake the admins up to get them to at least suspend my account. Eventually it was all sorted of course, but it did leave me thinking.

Users should be able to suspend their own account for up to 24 hours so that if this happens they are able to stop it themselves. A plug in like this would be perfect for forums of all kinds but it could also be made for blogs, CMSes etc.

My idea was as follows: There’s a page with a form that asks for a username and password, along with one of those random pictures that prevents automated submitting of the form. The user would enter their log in details of the forum into the form and submit the form, they’d then get to choose how long to suspend their account for anywhere from 2-24 hours. They get a confirmation email where they could finalise the issue.

This would of course have to have safeguards, for instance only allowing 3 wrong username/password attempts per day per IP and something to prevent successive suspensions.

Now, as Maddox would have said; Why are programming visualisations when you could be making this? Who wants to watch their music?