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

[quzah]

-----Original Message-----
From: s001gmu at nova.wright.edu <s001gmu at nova.wright.edu>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Sunday, August 09, 1998 11:23 AM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: ADMIN: Advertising on MUD-Dev


>
>
>On Sat, 8 Aug 1998, Michael Hohensee wrote:
>
>> 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. :)
>
>I had to include this whole message, because he took the words right out
>of my mouth.  I see no reason that the whole mess can't be automated.

[Snip]

I didn't reply to the first of this message, but since this is related,
I'll reply to it instead.

The problem with the above mentioned tags, is if someone forgets to remove
the tag from a quote. For example:

---
Original post:
   [tag]
   message...
   [endtag]

Quoted message
   [tag]
   Boffo wrote:
   > [tag]
   > message...
   > [endtag]
   new message...
   [endtag]
---

I'm sure it could be done sort of simple, keep track of how many opening
tags and closing tags, but then you have the problem of mismatched tags,
and , 'dang, I got 2 opening, and three closing'. Also, if the opening
and closing tags were identical, that too would create a problem in the
above "message", as only:

   [tag]
   Boffo wrote:
   > [tag]

would show up. The rest would end up getting scrapped. At any rate, I'm
sure you all have some brilliant (or just something simple that I have
overlooked) way that it would work better, but those are some problems
that came to my mind.
-Q-