[MUD-Dev] Custom Server Roll Call?

[Jay Carlson]

Caliban Tiresieas Darklock wrote on May 17:

> One of my "major enhancements" to the game I'm porting is teaching it to
> speak SMTP.
> [...]
> I think the only server which currently speaks SMTP is PennMUSH, and even
> then it only does character registration... so this seems like a
> great concept.

Yes, and it seemed like a great concept back in 1993 as well.

The moo-cows mailing list gets messages fairly often to the effect of: "I
have just implemented [ansi color] in moo.  As far as I know I am the first
person to do this.  Send me mail for the code."---often enough that one
group of moo developers I hang out with will say it in unison and sneer.

So I'm tempted to say "JHM had a general SMTP client in 1993 and afaik it
was the first mud to do so".  It probably was the first MOO to do outbound
mail, but I'm pretty sure that LPs had a better shot at first, given they
had outbound network earlier.  Non-SMTP mail solutions probably existed
before then as well.

LambdaCore picked up outbound mail from JHM shortly after that, so pretty
much every extant MOO server has this.

> But where it relates to the PBeM game is, if my MUD speaks SMTP, I could
> also theoretically teach it to speak POP3. Then I could allow players to
> email scripts to the server, and have the "results" mailed back.
> While this
> would be dangerous (who knows what will happen unexpectedly while your
> script is running), it would allow people who are out of the area for a
> while to just email a simple script to the game and later
> retrieve a status
> report from their mail account.
>
> Has anyone else considered such a scheme? Did you pursue it? What were the
> results?

Well, there have been a number of mail-delivered-to-MOO solutions in the
past; search the moo-cows archives for details.  Sadly, most of them appear
to be just gateways into the LambdaCore mail system rather than anything
more clever.

I mentioned your message to Ben Jackson, who thought it might be interesting
to put together a list of standard internet protocols implemented in mud
servers.  I can start with the list from JHM, in rough chronological order:

Gopher client (gopher slates, books, dictionaries, weather)
SMTP client (mails documents, contents of gopher slates)
HTTP server ( http://jhm.ccs.neu.edu:7043/ -- lots of stuff)
HTTP client (hey, HTTP is really just Gopher with "GET" stuck on the front)
NNTP client (aborted attempt to gateway in-db mailing lists to real news
servers)
POP3 server (reading personal mail)
NNTP server (reading personal mail and mailing lists)
DNS client (moo's builtin resolver sucks)

Of course after hearing this list Ben said something like "I'll do echo if
you do chargen", and there was a lot of speculation about how cool it would
be to have the first kerberos ticket-granting MOO server.

I think a number of MOO servers have IRC gateways although I don't know
whether they needed outboard support or not.

FTP is known to be solved for other servers.

IMAP server is pretty high on the MOO wishlist, again to try to get a grip
on the in-db mail situation.  CVS pserver client support could solve some
long-standing versioning problems that MOO has because its db isn't
file-based.

Anybody else?

Jay



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