[MUD-Dev] Re: Ubiquity Scope & Requirements

[Chris Gray]

[Greg Munt:]

 >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.

You need to have a very good interface to email and news in order that
players would have any desire to access these things from within the
MUD, rather than using their normal methods outside of the MUD. I had
simple text-only interfaces to email and news inside my AmigaMUD scenario,
with the intent of providing those things to users that didn't otherwise
have them (this was a couple years ago when they system was used on
BBS systems with dialin modems). As far as I am aware, the facility got
virtually no use.

In-context communication channels within the MUD (e.g. letters from
character to character, notes on bulletin boards, etc.) seem to be much
more popular. So, I would suggest being *sure* that there is a demand
for what you are proposing before spending a lot of effort implementing
it.

--
Chris Gray     cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA