Just tried this out for a laugh - my screen was covered in about 70% dodgey images. Are these supposed to be purely random ? Some pretty rough stuff popped up ...

That is a good point. This might be first brought to Pat's attention, that way he could at least make some decision on whether or not to keep it in the next release, but also you could send some kind of message to the creators of said screensaver and tell them this 'feature' would only cause unwanted troubles.


I never really cared for screensavers that much though. I usually either just leave my monitor on, or turn it off if I am gone longer than an hour or so. My CRT is a real trooper. 8 years old and still going strong after such constant use. If it were an LCD, then of course I would consider a screensaver....Nah, I would just turn it off anyways. Thats just me.


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As a short term solution, wouldn't it be possible to find out where in the config files or wherever it stores the web addresses and just remove out all the URLs relating to porn?

LoL No way should Pat or any distro take this out! IMHO its one of the best screen savers that comes with Xscreensaver. And you guys must be over zealous cause it my default screensaver and I really dont see to much porn,nudes,etc... Just alot of ugly people though

She did not want to see such images, nor risk her visitors seeing them. She likes the variety of the "Random" screensavers, however.

Well, I hate to disagree but perhaps Pat needs to take out this screensaver since a lot of potential younger users install Slackware, or it might be installed in a business setting or school. If not removing it completely, at least not installing it by default and just including it in /extras or something. I feel that this 'random' feature on this screensaver can cause unwanted backlash against Slackware and or *nix itself in some way.

I honestly never thought there could be such a fuss over a screensaver until now, but if this thread never came up, I would have never known about this 'feature' either.

Maybe Every Linux Distro needs to take out Firefox too. You know I came across some photos and videos and other content that no child should ever see! Firefox should be banned cause it could cause unwanted backlash against Slackware and or *nix itself in some way.

No, you are comparing a web browser where the user has control of where the browser goes to. This is a screensaver, not a browser, two completely different things. Nobody ever equated or ever even expected that a screensaver would pull up pornographic images. A web browser is different, and is controlled by the user.

But you do get to chose what screen saver you have running don't you?

Jamie Zawinski, the author of Netscape Navigator wrote it. it's actually a very clever screen saver and it DOES have the ability to *somewhat* filter the results (and, IIRC, does actually filter out things from sites like rotten.com & ogrish). If you use it, you'll notice it grabs mainly pictures as opposed to ads, banners, navigation buttons, spacers, etc - which it probably the vast majority of images on the net (non-photos, that is). It has a pretty neat algorithm for determining photo-worthiness of search results.

The goal of the thing is to grab random images from the web. [Un]fortunately, a large percentage of photos on the web are porn. You can further customize webcollage to pull images from a single source if you're concerned about the results. & if you feel like digging, the full perl source is available on the web that one could edit to their heart's content.

Most distros that have this screen saver have it disabled. One usually has to turn it on explicitly, so it's your own damn fault if you turn it on in a school without knowing what it is.

Well, it should be redesigned. You should just download some pictures yourself and make it use those for the collage. Seriously, random pics from the net is pure madness no matter how you try to filter it. How can you filter images ? by their names ? no, probably only by the sites they come from, but this isn't always helpful, in fact, it isn't very helpful at all.

Thanks for the heads up guys. I find this screensaver kind of amusing. I can see this program being popular in Fraternities and such. My philosophy is just don't use it if it offends you.

Best Regards

It's been a while since I've looked at the source, but IIRC, you CAN do that - point it at browser cache or make it only pull images from a single site. It's a rtfm sort of thing (no offense - it caught me off guard the first time I saw it too). There already exist screen savers the do slide shows based on a directory of images, webcollage is different/good (subjective) *because* it pulls random images from the web. Besides, like all xscreensavers, you can disable it, and as I said before, it's usually off by default.

It's a clever piece of code that shouldn't be swept under the rug simply because it may turn up porn. That's like saying don't walk outside because you might hear a swear.

...and really, I don't mean to call out your (H_TeXMeX_H) comments specifically - this is directed at everyone who thinks it's worthless.

Oh no, then I'd really be in deep fecal matter..........

The problem is that this one seems to be opt-out rather than opt-in. There should be no way that simply clicking on "Random" as a screensaver should bring up a screen full of porn without you consciously deciding that is what you want. Ever.

I'm with H_TexMex_H on this one, this needs a little attention from PatV.

Some distros have caught on to this issue. My Zenwalk machine has xscreensaver installed but Webcollage is disabled by default. When I click on it, it says 'not installed'. So it is certainly possible to bypass it.