[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Jay Carlson]

Ian Collyer writes:
> J C Lawrence wrote:
>> On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 08:10:28 -0700
>> Raph Koster <Koster> wrote:

>>> The logic against it goes like this:

>>>   * Yeesh! HOW much storage per player again? That's (takes out
>>>   * calculator) WAAAY too much money!

>>>   * Won't they use email anyway? We can't possibly make a nice *
>>>   enough email system to match Outlook!

>>>   * Yikes, think of the complications--email to account or to
>>>   user?

>> So make real email the default fallback after attempting the
>> target character.  First thoughts;

>>   -- Have each account register an email address (double opt-in
>>   plus periodic validity checks)

Done on the MOO JHM in, uh, 1993?  It was ported everywhere in the
MOO world pretty quickly.  Standard policy was to require secondary
human approval for email addresses not matching the request domain.

>>   -- If the recipient is currently online, have them receive the
>>   message in-game by whatever manner.  If they log off before
>>   receipt, treat exactly as if they were offline upon sending.

>>   -- If the recipient is not currently online, have messages be
>>   translated into email and sent to the registered address.

Yeah, some people implemented this for both mail and paging.
"@mail-option +netforward" says forward *all* mail, regardless of
online/offline status, and that seemed the most popular option.

At least one person I know forwards pages to a pager if his
character is either disconnected or sufficiently idle.

[...]

> Or alternatively...

> Write a pseudo-POP3 server that can be queried by any POP3
> compliant email client but is in fact just a method for giving
> external visibility to in-game personal messaging and message
> boards.

Done on JHM in...1995? 1996?  Back then, clients that could use
non-standard POP3 ports were pretty rare, though.

There aren't that many users of MOO POP3 afaik.  If you can have all
your mail forwarded to an external email address you can use your
standard mail-handling tools to manage message traffic.

In-MOO "mailing lists" (message boards in the above terms) resemble
public IMAP folders.  1996-7 saw JHM's authenticated NNTP service
for all mailing lists available to a user.  I don't know how many
people use this.

LambdaCore's mail system model is a pretty decent match to the model
implied by IMAP, but I don't think anybody cared enough about it to
go to the considerable trouble to implement an IMAP server.

> Allocate all characters a <charactername>@mymud.com style dummy
> email address on character creation.

Darn it, we never did get around to implementing an SMTP
listener---I think the biggest problem at the time was sendmail.cf
hackery; it was not well-known how to do delivery to virtual hosts
at the time.

> Voila! For some relatively simple emulation code and minimal
> storage overhead you have now made integrated in-character
> communication available outside of the MUD. Even better if replies
> can be translated back into in-game communications.

You should decide early on whether you're trying to double-blind
addresses---is my real email address private?  Can I hit reply in
Outlook and know that the message will show up as From:
Jay at mymud.com instead of nop at nop.com?  If so, you'll need to
implement a separate authenticated SMTP listener for Outlook to
queue to.

The good news is that O98/O2k/OE support this kind of setup fairly
well today.  As another poster points out, getting non-technical
users to fill in all the configuration details would be another
problem....

[...]

> Player-player trading with one party in the MUD and the other on a
> WAP phone anyone?

This sounds like it would have the same fate as the above-mentioned
JHCore services: they were a lot of fun to implement, they have a
few dedicated users, but they remained cool toys for hack value.

Jay

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev