[MUD-Dev] Re: Spellchecking

[Travis Casey]

On 23 September 1998, Richard Woolcock wrote:

> At first I thought about adding the occasional typo in mob speech, but
> quickly discarded that idea.

Why?  It seems to me that it would be easier and faster than
spellchecking all player speech...

A few thoughts/problems...

 - Many misspellings create valid words -- to use an example that
   seems to be very common on the net, "lose" can be misspelled
   "loose", but both are valid words.

 - A truly good spellchecker will require grammar checking as well.
   For example, to catch the "loose" vs. "lose" problem, "cant" vs.
   "can't", etc.

 - What will be done with words the spellchecker doesn't recognize?
   Personally, I wouldn't play on a mud that limited the words I
   could use in conversation, or on one which kept "fixing" my
   spelling when I used words that weren't in the dictionary.

 - There are cases where someone might want to misspell something;
   for example, in quoting something which was itself misspelled,
   to abbreviate long words, or to represent an accent or dialect
   (e.g., "Cap'n, I canna change the laws of physics!"  Or, to give
   an example relevant to a fantasy mud, "M'lud, 'tis summat wrong
   here.").

 - You mention making allowances for names, but what about nicknames,
   or characters with more than one name?  In RL, my name is Travis
   Shannon Casey, but I've had Trav, Vus, Trevor, TC, TS, Shannon, and
   Casey as nicknames at different times.  While this is less common
   on muds, there are people, particularly those with longer names for
   their characters, who have nicknames.  (E.g., on SWmud, one of our
   wizzes was Rustitobuck, who was universally called "Rusty").

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