[MUD-Dev] Re: ADMIN: Advertising on MUD-Dev

[Michael Hohensee]

How about this:

Most advertisements that free email providers attach to users' messages
consist of links and text either before or after the main body of the
message.  It wouldn't be hard to chop this stuff out if people attach a
small tagline at the beginning and end of their message.  All you need
to do then is have the mailserver automatically chop everything in the
main body of the message before and after these tags.

So if I'm writing a message to the list with one of these email
services, I would type something like this:

*<MUD-Dev>*
Hi, I've just had a few thoughts about Bubba and Buffy --don't you think
they're a little strange?  After all, they've been together quite a long
time, one wonders that nothing has developed between them..

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that one of them gets
killed every once in a while. :)

--J. Random Slob
*<MUD-Dev>*

Then the mail server just looks for those tags, and if it can find them,
makes a few snips.  Voila, the advertisements never were. ;>  To enforce
this, you can compile a list of the most common free email services'
domain names (i.e. hotmail.com, geocities.com, tripod.com, etc), and
bounce any messages from these domains which do not contain the
*<MUD-Dev>* tag with some suitable explaination.

That way, you keep the advertisements at bay, while having to do only
minimal work to keep it updated against advertising.  Heck, all you'd
have to do when a new advertiser-mailer comes along is run a script
which runs something like "add_advertiser 'domain.net'" and pastes
'domain.net' onto the end of the advertisers' list.

Hope this helps. :)

--
Michael Hohensee       michael at mainstream.net
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Heights/9025/
      Finger me for my PGP Public Key, or use: 
http://sparta.mainstream.net/michael/pgpkey.txt