FW: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[F. Randall Farmer]

> From: Travis Nixon

> You know, at one point a friend and I were attempting to conceive of
> a tree-based dialogue system where you didn't actually type anything
> to anybody, not even to other players.

A quick story from someone I met who worked on one of these in order
to try to meet a "child safe" requirement for an kids online service
(it was one of the Starbright products...)

They figured that limiting the vocabulary would keep the offensive
content out of the service. They changed their minds after a 14-year
old created the following construct-a-sentence out of the
non-offensive word list:

  "I want to stick my long-necked giraffe up your fluffy white bunny."

Another of Farmer's laws: You can't preemptively control user
communication without disabling it completely.  Get used to it.

More support for this law:

  StickerWorld, another Kids offering has customizable signs where
  they took out several consonants (including F) and most of the
  vowels and added some icons like an eye for the letter I. I was able
  to post a message about "ass kissing" with little
  difficulty. Another user was able to encode their ICQ ID (thereby
  opening the service to the dreaded pedophile risk) in order to
  facilitate trading.

The UO-not-offering-IM-at-the-start story [I ranted a bit on this
earlier, it should be in the archives.]

Randy

[One of the few benefits of being between jobs is the ability to
participate in this list once again. :-D]

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