chapter 6 "Privacy"
One of the most powerful and most easily abused tools
in your administrative arsenal is the snoop command. When
you "snoop <person>", you get to see everything they
say and do.
Players usually find this intrusive and objectionable,
and it is ethically shaky to do this without their
knowledge and consent. The only circumstances under which
snooping is unambiguously ethical are:
* Snooping one of your own test characters.
* Snooping a player (with their consent) for the purposes of
troubleshooting a bug.
* Snooping a user (without their consent) to investigate
a legitimate suspicion of malfeasance.
Secretly snooping people for your personal amusement is
just flat wrong.
By default, only admins can snoop. Admins are players who
are members of one or both of the groups SECURE and ASSIST.
An assistant admin *cannot* snoop a full admin. However,
assistant admins have read access to the snoop log directory,
so if global monitoring is enabled, they can read the
contents of a full admin's monitor log.
The new SNOOP_D system allows for the simultaneous
snooping of multiple people, and allows multiple people to
snoop the same person. It also permits you to enable
monitoring of users without having to snoop, by using the
monitor command to log i/o to /secure/log/adm.
The GLOBAL_MONITOR parameter in config.h will take one of three
arguments. 0 = monitor nobody. 1 = monitor everyone. 2 = monitor
everyone except admins. After changing it, reboot the mud
to make sure the change takes effect.
This functionality isn't here for your entertainment. In
fact, I had to think long and hard before sharing my snoop
code with you and putting it in the general lib distribution.
In the end, though, I believe that the benefits outweigh
the risk of abuse. As an admin, you have the right to know
what's going on in your mud, and as a lib coder, it isn't
my business to interfere with that.
