[MUD-Dev] Trouble Makers or Regular Citizens

[Chris Jones]

J C Lawrence wrote:
> Justin Rogers <justin at mlstoday.com> wrote:
> > So why not allow one person to turn off another person?
> 
> There's some good discussion on this idea back in the archives.  I'd
> love to see large playerbase testing of an implementation.  The
> potential effects on societal forms and small group dynamics are
> insidious at best and pernicious at worst, and that's not accounting
> for the abuse factors.

	Lambda & the other MOOs are perfect examples of an implementation --
gagging (not receiving text or pages that the other player sends) and
refusal (refusing to receive mail or a whole host of other things) have
been around in MOO for a long time, to the point where they're part of
the standard distribution.  In this time, a number of problems --
essentially what J C pointed out -- have arisen, to the point where
disputes consistently got launched on Lambda, while the arbitration
system was still in existence.

	And that's not counting the interesting and insidious things you can do
in reverse, like reverse-gagging, where you don't send any actions to a
selected player.  Let's say Munchkin doesn't like Freblebit, and decides
to (programatically) reverse-gag Freblebit: Munchkin could then say
whatever e wanted about Freblebit, even in eir presence, and unless
someone else noticed this and started a conversation with Munchkin or
Freblebit about it, Freblebit would never know.  The disputes over that
got seriously intense.

	CJ



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