[MUD-Dev] No bots allowed

[Frank Crowell]

"No bots allowed" comes from a proposal made by a developer for a
very popular proxy bot for Quake.  Proxy bots are cyborgs that
combines human and computer-assisted actions into the client.  Many
people felt that proxy bots were a form of cheating.  In fact,
idsoftware added additional security to their Quakeworld protocol to
stop the proxy bots. Of course this all stopped the pure software
bots too.

Anyway, the proposal was to have the string "no bots" in the center
of the Quake welcome message.  The full string was actually "no bots
allowed please". I would like to suggest that the same thing should
be used for disallowing bots in virtual worlds.

I know there is a document concerning web servers and bots, and I
also thought there was one for software agents. Earlier today I told
a budding bot developer that I thought the minimum protocol was to:

  1. tell the server you are a bot

  2. give you bot-type and version number

But after reading the Quake article, I thought the "no bots allowed
please" is the easiest, cleanest way to handle how to get bots to
disconnect from a server.

Why would I want bots banned? I actually don't and a few years ago I
overposted in MOO mail list and mud newsgroup in support of bots and
things that I felt could help bots more.  You guys were lucky cause
you only got the bits and pieces after I was already tired of
posting about it -- pieces like portable characters (mobile agents),
a bit about digital objects, and at least one posting talking about
using external bots instead of internal bots. Yes, I still believe
if the thing is suppose to be smarter than an snake, then it should
be an external bot.

Unfortunately, I see that on maddog.com that I lost a few key
articles about the inital co-evolution of external bots and muds.
And then finally to the year or two of bot/admin wars, where the mud
admins were eagerly building bot traps and posting their version of
"no bots allowed".

I have always been and continue to be very pro bot.  But I also see
that --except for academic R&D bots (whoops i mean agents) that
don't do much-- bots have been the ugly stepchildren of virtual
worlds. The Internet world seems like the only one that didn't get
hyperkinetic over bot-issues. Someone came up with some simple rules
for bots to follow and the robots.txt file (something like that if
not that).

So, what do you think?  Should the mud side of virtual worlds have
the convention of "no bots allowed please"?

One other possiblity is to have a bot port with its own login,
information request, and access levels.  No message would mean its
okay to using existing port, "no bots" would mean disconnect and
dont go hunting for additional port numbers, and "bot access
allowed:<port-no>" would mean go to port and do the right stuff
there.  Of course the "access allowed" should also mean that the
server is going to cooperate with the bot and that there some way to
deal with the protocol.

frank
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