I followed the discussion of the pros/cons about a permanent/savable/60sec etc. blocking of searches.
Interested in how big the problem is, i watched the monitor for about an hour and blocked every search of the kind of *.* ; *
.mp3 ; a mp3 ; ... I got a total of 198 blocked searches in the first 20 mins.
Considering this i think at least on option to permanently block searches is a must. Perhaps you can build in a sort of intelligent blocking. My suggestion is that every search containing LESS that 3 letters (excluding spaces and at least "mp3") should be blocked automatically. I got a LOT of searches like "a mp3", "b mp3" and so on. Either they are so much stupid people out there (call me an optimist ) or there are couple people trying to block the GnutellaNet with DOS. Also i suggest a saveable list of manually blocked searches (if someone for understandable reasons do not want to support searches for "teen sex" or simmiliar) and handle this list a way a search is blocked containing a word included in the list, not the exact phrase (so if you block "teen" searches for "teen sex" will also be blocked), and a second list where entrys are either automatically added (same search 3 times in 2 mins -> blocked) and manually that is cleared with a configurable timer, default should then be 60 sec. .
I think this is best to handle this feature, but it's only my § 0.02

Fireball

PS: I don't know it it's possible, but can't you implement a checksum, even if it's only used when gnutella is serving and actiong as client ? So the other programs just get a message they don't understand and that for ignore ?