[MUD-Dev] Re: Spellchecking

[Richard Woolcock]

Travis Casey wrote:
> 
> 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...

I dislike coding things just because they are "easier" and "faster".  Typo's
detract from roleplaying IMO, and putting typo's into mob speech would be
sacrificing IC realism for OOC realism.

> 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.

True.

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

True again - but this isn't designed to be a perfect system, just an
aid to the existing one.

>  - 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.

To be honest, I'm not really bothered about whether you would play it
or not - for everyone who would hate the system, there would be someone
else who loved it.  That is the way of muds.

Having said that, perhaps players could have a toggle?  Something like:

   1. Ignore spellchecker.
   2. Refuse sentences with typo's in them.
   3. Correct sentences with typo's in them.

I'm not sure if I'd allow option 1 though, particularly if I intend to
dissect everything people say in order to work out what they are talking
about, for use with other code (introduction system, mob speech, learning
information from other players, etc).  Wouldn't it be nice, when someone
says "I saw John Smith kill Joe Blogs", to be able to tell (via supernatural
powers or whatever) whether or not that person is telling the truth?

>  - 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.").

True, although I could add the most common of such words to the list.

>  - 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").

Once again my code wouldn't be able to do this (unless I added a selection
of nicknames appropriate to each name, which wouldn't be difficult).  All
players have two IC names by the way.

KaVir.