Feature suggest + Bug

[LWard]

Thanks much for implementing the fix for my last reported problem! Can do sweeping destruction now without getting .NET errors!

Are there any best practices for creating signatures at all? For a while I've put everything in to a single master list, then smaller lists as I find new flash games and games embedded in excel spreadsheets and PDFs and each time, as expected but not quite as much, scanning speed gets significantly slower each time. Is it preferred to add a small (5 or 10) files to a signature before creating a second list or to create one single file with everything in it?

Reason I ask is that sometimes I'm asked to build a list of students with games in their areas literally 8 hours (or worse, 15 minutes notice, but thats an impossibility) before SMT (so he can name and shame students, especially reoffenders) and it normally requires over 24 hours to complete!

Secondly, Signature Creator creates a signature file based on what you enter in the "Signature Title" box. As a result there are some symbols that should never be used in there, like ":" or "\". Might be worth sticking some field validation in there to avoid someone reporting it in the future.

And lastly, whats the possibility of an "Add Folder..." button which allows someone to add a folder full of games or infringing files in one go? If someone is new to Edusweep and they have a large list of files they've taken from students areas they want to have removed/logged on each run, then having to add each file individually might be a put off! Wasn't for me because it was literally a case of do that or use the Windows search tool to traverse the entire of student home directories and look for files with the same file sizes and individually note down their usernames, how many infringing files they had, where they were located and to check again the next day to see if they got rid of them, adding each file individually was the easy option!

Thanks for building such a fantastic tool, saves me hours of manual report building!

[bizzel]

I'm working on improving performance for the 2.2 release so I'll keep you posted on the progress. 24 hours sounds excessive but we should be able to cut that several times over.

If you want the gory technical details, currently EduSweep uses regular expressions to detect the file extensions and keywords. Specific files that you add to signatures are detected by checking the sizes and hashes which will obviously slow things down some. The regular expressions remain quite fast so I'm focusing on the hashing at the moment; perhaps I'll go as far as reading the files in the same way that antivirus software does.