@dotme I will be honest .. this server is mainly for me. I do a lot of work on other computers away from home and when I'm working on a computer for a few hours its nice to have a place to hear good music (on air stations here really suck)
as for turning people away for using the flash player... like i said ... when you run a 'small' station, you get 'picked' on... Open a second station with only a few slots and use your logs ... you will see what I mean. You will get people that will try to fill your slots so no one can connect ... they will reconnect over and over thousands of times 0 seconds each time most likely using a program to do it... as well as other things to mess with the station. Most of this abuse is done using the 'web based player' and I can only assume that its the SHOUTcast player that people are abusing because a while back the abuse used to come from the Windows Media Player (SHOUTcast1) then they changed the player and now the abuse comes from MPEG OVERRIDE (SHOUTcast2).
In my opinion I don't see the flash player being any easier than clicking a link and having it open winamp/itunes/wmp. You still have to click on a link... its it that much easier for it to open another web window rather than it is to open a default media player? (rhetorical question) Plus using my audio program seems to sound so much better than the flash player. I guess the sound processing is much better geared to handle surround sound in the external players than it is in flash.
But finally the dev team is looking into it... and like I said I figured a way to use the problem to my advantage. If anyone is a legit listener and they like my station they can connect using their favorite external player ... this kinda kills two birds with one stone because now I don't have to worry about the bots... tho I do have to worry if the people connecting can speak English and understand my intro message (I get a lot of connections from Mexico and from Germany)