Hi mchain,
Well actually Pondus and polonus and others here always take no more than very calculated risks.
Whatever we do is done with utmost care, most of the scanning is third party scanning and then we will never actually go to the infected site
('cause some malcode could "broil over").
If we use a file viewer or mazilla we do this under special security settings (sandboxed and scripts blocked).
But these situations are rare and far in between and most is done through totally safe "cold reconnaisance".
We have a lot of online scanners to our disposition: urlquery (html and IDS emerging threats and snort), urlvoid, virustotal meta, zulu zscaler,
Brightcloud, sucuri (script malware), malekal, wepawet, anubis, specific script scanners, malicious iFrame scanning services, de-obfuscatiion tools
(!Donovan's expertise really), malware searchlore, (my kettle of fish) etc. etc.
All important finds are reported to virus AT avast dot com. Undetected malcode further reported to zulu Zscaler (feedback) and DrWeb;s url checker etc.
After every browser session I do a full browser scan.
It is tedeous work, but it brought lots of worthwile and interesting insight and created a lot of mutual inspiration for those that were into it.
But the most important issue here is to enhance avast detection in many respects. If I see that later it is rather rewarding....
Stay safe and secure online is the wish of,
polonus