[MUD-Dev] Re: Ubiquity Scope & Requirements

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Chris Gray wrote:
> 
> [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.

See, what I was driving at is that the overhead of creating a bug-free
and efficient and feature-rich communication exceeds the reasonable
limits unless you have resources similar to Microsoft behind your back.
At the same time, it's perfectly easy to implement the player-to-player
mail with the MUD identities and without the real ones if you have at
most moderate knowledge of sendmail, and I'm sure it's also possible
with news. And, the usual MUAs (mail user agents) are, as a rule,
carefully chosen and handcrafted by users, which is really difficult to
achieve with own tools.

Is it worth the effort to reinvent the bicycle? This is a rhetorical
question, my answer is no.

The exception is a talker, which seems to be a part of the MUD core
anyway.

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

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are