[DGD]Hello, think you could answer a few questiosn for me? :)

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Mon, 24 Apr 2000, John West McKenna wrote:
> DGD doesn't have snoop() or shadow().  As far as I can see, these are
> nothing but security holes.  Does anyone know what they're actually good
> for?

If you are actually running a mud with a sizeable number of
players (I adminned one that averaged 60-80 players online
at once, about 300 unique players per day, for a couple years)
then snoop() or something like it is absolutely necessary for
enforcing the rules. Problems with sexual harassment, player
killing, newbie abuse, multiple logins, any situation involving
rules like that are very hard to solve unless you can snoop
and see what the suspect is doing. You should have a general
disclaimer in your login process advising people not to assume
they have more privacy than they actually do. The problem is to
make sure that snoop() is only accessible to those who really
need it, and only when.

Of course, it's not impossible to add a snoop() feature to
your DGD mudlib of choice, though I don't know of any that
come with it unless 2.4.5 does.

I concur that shadow() is not necessary and may not be worth
the risk of having it. It depends on how comfortable you are
with mudlibs that have a separate body object and connection
object, and how willing you are to swap bodies around. If you
have a game design that requires lots of doppleganger-type
behavior, and you don't wanna swap body objects all the time,
then shadow() can be pretty handy. But otherwise it's not
the Right Thing.

> There's more, but I'm a bit hazy on the details.  DGD supports saving the
> entire MUD state to a file, so you can restart as if nothing had happened.

That's my very favorite feature, because it lets you create a
world which can be permanently altered by the players themselves
in a  meaningful way. (You can hack such behavior in under MudOS,
but it's a lot easier under DGD.) The games I'm interested in
creating would use that feature, so I would want DGD for them.
But if that's not your angle, then it may not be so useful.


Stephen Schmidt

It is vain to expect a well-balanced government without a
well-balanced society.
			-- Gideon Welles



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