[MUD-Dev] Re: Ubiquity Scope & Requirements

[Greg Munt]

From: Vadim Tkachenko +ADw-vt+AEA-freehold.crocodile.org+AD4-


+AD4-Greg Munt wrote:
+AD4APg-
+AD4-
+AD4AWw-skipped a lot+AF0-
+AD4-
+AD4APg- IT PROVIDES VARIOUS SERVICES TO ITS USERS
+AD4APg- In order to determine what functionality it is that Ubiquity
+AD4APg- should provide, the Internet facilities that are currently
+AD4APg- available need to be looked at - those that satisfy Socialiser
+AD4APg- goals. The reason for this, is that only a small minority of
+AD4APg- people will use something completely different to that which
+AD4APg- they are used to (this can be clearly seen by the dominance
+AD4APg- of TinyMUD, LPMUD and DIKUMUD throughout the mud world)+ADs- people
+AD4APg- tend to stick with what they know, even if a newer product is
+AD4APg- much better. These services are as follows:
+AD4APg-                     Email
+AD4APg-                     Newsgroups
+AD4APg-                     Internet-Relayed Chat (IRC)
+AD4APg-                     Information Repositories
+AD4APg-                     Games
+AD4-
+AD4-Can you please elaborate, are you going to just provide the mail access
+AD4-to the players like a Hotmail virtual account and just have a dedicated
+AD4-news server with access restricted to the users, or you're going to
+AD4-embed those services in the MUD core?


Both. In-game, players will be able to mail each other, and there will be
internal newsgroups. Later, players will be able to email, through Ubiquity,
to 'real' Internet addresses, with reply addresses of playername+AEA-mudhost.com
(would probably need a dedicated server for that). They will be able to
choose if email (from both internal and external sources) is sent just to
their internal account (which has imposed restrictions, see below), just to
their Internet email account, or both. Later, players won't need to login to
the mud, just to read their mail, and would (I guess) function similarly to
hotmail - in that regard only.

Internal mailboxes will be subject to a limit on how many messages can be
stored. When this limit has been reached, a new message will cause the
oldest message to be automatically deleted. Messages of a certain age are
deleted also. However, messages may be 'saved', to protect them from
deletion, but saved messages still count towards the limit on the number of
messages in the mailbox.

Newsgroups will grow in a similar way, starting with internal newsgroups
(each of which has its own assigned IRC-like channel, allowing for real-time
chat to develop threads in real-time). Players will have the option of
copying newsgroup posts to their internal and external mail accounts, and
also of having all posts to a group being redirected there. Later you will
be able to post from your external mail account, directly to these internal
groups. Eventually, I aim to provide access to Usenet through the game's
GUI, and to allow players to post from the mud, directly to news servers
(their choice of server).

Note that the above isn't clearly thought out yet. The reason I didn't
elaborate originally, is because I have only got as far as the requirements
specification so far.