<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html><head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type"><title>Router Controversy</title> <link rel="icon" href="http://dead-souls.net/articles/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon"> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://dead-souls.net/articles/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon"></head><body> <pre style="font-family: courier new,courier,monospace;"><big><big><big style="font-weight: bold;">The Intermud Router Controversy<br><br></big></big> "No good deed goes unpunished."<br><br></big><big><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="#history">A brief history of Intermud-3</a><br></span></big><big><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="#birth">The birth of *yatmim</a><br></span></big><a href="#death"><big><span style="text-decoration: underline;">The death of *gjs</span></big></a><br><big><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="#conflict">The first conflict</a><br></span></big><big><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="#authority">A question of application of authority</a><br></span></big><big><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="#heckling">A knack for heckling</a><br></span></big><a href="#diy"><big><span style="text-decoration: underline;">DIY</span></big></a><br><big><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="#bullyboys">Dear darling fascist bullyboys</a><br></span></big><a href="#hope"><big><span style="text-decoration: underline;">A New Hope</span></big></a><big><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span></big><big><br><a href="#forward"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Going forward</span></a><br></big><br><big><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><br></span></big><big><br><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><a name="history"></a>A brief history of Intermud-3:</span><br><br> I3 as a protocol was born of a desire to have communication<br>between muds. The developers put together a specification and coded<br>an implementation on a mud that served as a reference. Other muds<br>used this protocol, and it became a de-facto standard for networked<br>communication between MudOS muds. Other LP muds have used it, and<br>even Diku-based codebases have implementations available to them.<br><br> The way I3 works is that your mud has a client program<br>which can be configured to connect to an I3 server. That server is<br>usually a mud running special server code. That server code is<br>called the "router" code, and the mud that runs it is called the<br>"intermud router". The router serves as a central hub for communication,<br>so muds that want to talk to each other using the I3 protocol will<br>connect to one router, which will then forward data between them.<br>When lots of muds connect, you can have a lively, fun community <br>space for chatting and help and such.<br><br> The developers of I3 ran the main intermud router. It<br>was called *gjs. The asterisk is part of the name, and is meaningful<br>to internal router processes. However, the asterisk is commonly <br>dropped from router names when discussing them casually.<br><br> *gjs had rules. Using colors on channels was forbidden,<br>for example. Hate speech was not allowed. Muds who made nuisances of<br>themselves could find themselves banned from the router. <br><br> As the years passed, the router admins seemed to have less<br>and less interest in the router. The last time I saw any rule <br>enforced was back in 98 or 99, when StarMUD was banned...and frankly<br>I don't even remember what they were banned for. My best guess is that<br>the admins just got bored with running the router, and couldn't<br>be bothered arguing with jerks about rules. <br><br> By 2006, *gjs was extremely unreliable. It would go<br>down, literally for days, then mysteriously come back up with no<br>word of explanation. Its flagship chat channel, imud_gossip, had<br>become such a notorious cesspool that at least one major codebase<br>maintainer swore off putting I3 code in his work. New muds were<br>heavily abused, in some cases to the point of <a href="http://dead-souls.net/duuk.txt">destruction</a>. Casual use<br>of hate speech (stuff instantly censored on any MUD discussion <br>board I've been on) was common enough to be unremarkable. <br><br><br><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><a name="birth"></a>The birth of *yatmim:</span><br><br> By that time, I had picked up maintainership of the<br>Dead Souls codebase. Dead Souls muds had historically been part<br>of the I3 community, and as the maintainer, I encouraged people to<br>use intermud as a way to ask questions and share their experiences.<br><br> However, the atmosphere of hostility at *gjs and its<br>unreliability made it hard for me to foster the new community<br>I wanted to nurture. I decided that I would set up an alternate<br>router. This would be a router people could count on to actually<br>be up and running all the time, and a place where they could go<br>without fear of punishment for just being new.<br><br> It was my intention to provide an alternative. If people wanted<br>to go back to *gjs and its degeneracy, that was fine by me. Nothing<br>in the code prevented it (and in fact, I added a command to switch<br>back and forth as one pleased). But at least *new* muds would get a <br>chance to wade in the shallow end before diving into the the<br>piranha pit.<br><br> The new router was called *yatmim. It was just a<br>couple dozen Dead Souls muds, mostly empty. The idea never, ever, was<br>to compete with *gjs. How could I? The eminences of LP mud were there,<br>probably ossified into their router connections. All *yatmim was<br>intended to be was a place for new muds to catch their breath, get<br>their heads on straight, and if they wished, then move elsewhere.<br><br> It occurred to me during one of *gjs's long downtimes<br>that others might want to know about an alternate router, so I<br>posted an invitation to other muds to join *yatmim, <span style="font-weight: bold;">IF</span> they<br>agreed to abide by the rules.<br><br> Since hostility was half the problem I wanted to solve,<br>*yatmim had rules. Pretty standard stuff, and the kind of thing you'd<br>expect at a place where community support is the point. Don't<br>hassle newbies, don't use hate speech, don't spam the channels, etc.<br>None of it was hard to comply with if you're a normal person, and<br>none of the DS muds that joined complained. <br><br> *yatmim chugged along, a happy, friendly little community<br>away from the grue of *gjs.<br><br><br><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><a name="death"></a>The death of *gjs:</span><br><br> On August 1 2006, *gjs went down again. This was not unusual.<br>By the summer of 2006, *gjs had become so wildly unstable that it<br>would be fair to say it was up and down in equal measure. I didn't<br>think much of it at the time.<br><br> Days passed, then weeks, and it became clear that that<br>this might not be an ordinary failure. After two months, I posted<br><a href="http://www.mudconnect.com/discuss/discuss.cgi?mode=MSG&area=promotions&message=16247#16247">another invitation</a> to muds. It seemed to me that it would be a nice <br>kind of public service to offer some refuge to the abandoned. I made<br>it very clear in every invitation I made, be it posted or personal,<br>that *yatmim had rules and they were enforced. <br><br> Perhaps I should have known better. I've subsequently<br>been accused of being responsible for the conflicts that came, and<br>that I should have foreseen them. Maybe that is true. In my defense,<br>I thought I was being reasonable. I gave people the option to join<br>or not join, based on their willingness to obey the rules. It's<br>a bargain we strike all the time, when we enter a home, pub, or<br>even a public park. It's not a new concept, it's not hard to understand,<br>and yes, I trusted my fellow humans to make informed decisions on<br>this point. If that makes me guilty of something, I argue I'm<br>guilty of common sense expectations of normal behavior.<br><br> <br><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><a name="conflict"></a>The first conflict:</span><br><br> Duuk@Haven and Corvin@Nanvaent are folks well known for<br>the vile content of their speech and their habitual hostility.<br>One can see them as "adding flavor" to a community I suppose, and<br>in any case, who cares that much. But once on *yatmim, they were<br>subject to the rules, which they broke.<br><br> Despite frequent pleas on my part, and ever-sterner<br>warnings, both of them chose to continue to use racist language<br>on a channel where it is not permitted. Eventually I came to the conclusion<br>that rules are pointless without enforcement, and as admin, I'd<br>have to do something about it. So I banned their muds from the<br>imud_gossip channel.<br><br> They could still connect to the router and talk on other channels.<br>They could do tells to other people, remote who's and finger's. But<br>since they kept breaking channel rules, I removed them from the<br>channel they were abusing.<br><br> A howl of protest erupted from the people on both muds, <br>and from someone named Arren, who appeared to take on their cause.<br>You can read a log of how the conflict was debated <a href="http://dead-souls.net/articles/chanban.html">here</a>.<br><br> The level of rancor was surprising to me. After all, I<br>thought my actions were not only rational and reasonable, but<br>inevitable given the rules. I wondered if there was a problem I was<br>misunderstanding, so I opened up the question to vote and discussion<br>on a forum site. The vote results and some comments are <a href="http://lpmuds.net/debate1.html">here</a>.<br><br> The final page of the discussion is <a href="http://lpmuds.net/debate2.html">here</a>.<br><br> I had been surprised by the nature of the opposition to<br>my act, but it was the vote result that surprised me the most. <br>Out of the 14 people who bothered to vote, exactly one felt that<br>the rules should be changed.<br><br> I was completely taken aback. Certainly more than one person<br>in the discussion thread opposed the bans...so what was going on?<br><br><br style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><a name="authority"></a>A question of application of authority:</span><br><br> It seems that the problem Arren had was in how the rules<br>were applied. It seems that the problem most others had was that<br>the rules <span style="font-style: italic;">were</span> applied, or that it was me who was applying them.<br><br> As far as I can tell, nostalgia for the old laissez-faire<br>adminship of *gjs was what I was running into. Nobody was really<br>up to arguing against the rules. And, really, how could they?<br>They're the most standard, typical rules of moderated forums. <br><br> What they didn't like was not being in the decision-making,<br>and that the rules, fine as they might be, were actually applied<br><span style="font-style: italic;">at all</span>.<br><br> As I indicated in the discussion thread, I was at a<br>complete loss as to how to address those concerns. I am unable<br>to morph into someone else. The router design is based on a<br>standard I did not develop. Someone has to have admin privs, and<br>if there are to be rules, that admin has to enforce them, or<br>they are moot. <br><br> I didn't know what I could possibly do to change anything<br>to people's satisfaction, given that as far as I could tell:<br><br>1) The rules were generally agreed to.<br>2) Muds implicitly agreed to them by joining *yatmim.<br>3) I had tried to avoid being a jerk, by first warning, and<br> finally only banning in the most limited way I could.<br>4) When the muds in question agreed to comply I immediately<br> let them back on.<br><br> The only conclusion I could reach was that the problem<br>was unhappiness with a single person being in complete control<br>of the enforcement process. At the end of the thread, I invited<br>folks to work toward some sort of distributed I3, if this<br>really was the problem.<br><br> I received no responses offering to help in this endeavor.<br><br><br><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><a name="heckling"></a>A knack for heckling:</span><br><br> Throughout these events, the mission of *yatmim has<br>remained the same. It is a place for new muds to conduct their<br>business according to the rules I set down. I set them down<br>for the purposes that suit me, among them providing a space for support<br>of new muds, particularly Dead Souls muds, the lib I develop.<br><br> Following the death of *gjs, refugees are welcome and<br>I have very much enjoyed their participation, because the <br>vast majority find the rules unremarkable and ostensibly acceptable.<br><br> However, a tiny minority of hecklers appears to have<br>taken to heart the misconception that *yatmim is the new *gjs.<br>If that's your assumption, then an obvious set of logical<br>steps follow: Cratylus is trying to reform people, he's usurping<br>control over something he has no right to, etc.<br><br> Somehow in the noise is lost the fact that this is<br>a router people volutarily connected to, subject to the rules<br>which derive from its mission. <br><br> *yatmim was never intended to be the new *gjs. *yatmim<br>started <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">because *gjs was the problem</span>. <br><br><br><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><a name="diy"></a>DIY:</span><br><br> In the finest traditions of the internet, rather than<br>complain on *gjs about how unsuitable it was for my purposes, <br>I just rolled my own. I used Tim@TimMUD's fine router code<br>to put up *yatmim, because relying on other people to fix my<br>technical/development problem is something that has just never<br>quite panned out for me.<br><br> I have similarly made it possible for anyone who wants<br>to run an intermud router to do so. I include the router code in<br>every single download of Dead Souls. Anyone can download it <br>and make their own router, where the rules can be or not<br>be to their heart's content.<br><br> It seems to me that if people really want to have *gjs<br>back, they can either track down the old *gjs admins and<br>have it out, or they can set up their own router, which is<br>incredibly easy to do now with Dead Souls.<br><br> Instead, a few folks prefer to whine and threaten and complain. <br><br><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><a name="bullyboys"></a>Dear darling fascist bullyboys:</span><br><br> In a way, this article is dedicated to them, because it<br>is intended to serve as the official response to their continuing<br>petulance, and those (and yes, there seem to be some) that are<br>swayed by their ad hominem attacks.<br><br> It's hard for me not to respond when someone complains,<br>because I take Dead Souls seriously, and I take the purpose<br>of *yatmim seriously. I find it difficult just ignoring people, even when<br>their position has been shown to be moot, or incorrect, or<br>just plain mean-spirited and in bad faith. I feel like it starts<br>me down the path of evil, the dark path of the Admin That Just<br>Doesn't Care. And so I find myself involved in the exact same<br>argument with some folks, over and over and over, as if they were<br>incapable of remembering the rules they agreed to.<br><br> As much as I want to continue being a responsive admin,<br>as much as I want to demonstrate that I am not trying to be their boss,<br>not interested in their private communications, not invested in<br>being The Next *gjs....there's a limit to my time. I can't get stuck<br>in these Groundhog Day debates whenever someone is bored. Continuing<br>to justify my intentions takes up time I can ill afford on petty<br>bickering.<br><br> Let this article stand as the response to whatever<br>charge of malicious intermud intent is presented against me. If<br>it is insufficient, then let the chips fall where they may.<br><br><br><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><a name="hope"></a>A New Hope:</span><br><br> Arren@Anarres II has set up a new router. Please see the<br><a href="http://lpmuds.net/intermud.html">LPMuds.net intermud page</a> for connection details. <br><br> When he set up this router, another Arren debate<br>occurred. You can see the details <a href="http://lpmuds.net/router_debate.html">here</a>.<br><br> A you can see, it's rather confusing. What he'd first<br>agreed to was being listed on the intermud page, but then he<br>wanted "primary routership". He agreed with the idea of setting up<br>an inter router network but then continued to argue for his<br>being primary router, which in the context of a distributed<br>network doesn't make sense. If there's an inter router network, <br>what difference does it make who is the admin of which router?<br><br> And finally, though he continually argued against<br>"fragmentation", when I hesitated to agree to all of his demands<br>that very night, he decided it was ok to ask muds on *yatmim<br>over to his router.<br><br> I think it's understandable for me to be wary of the<br>conflicting messages and the aggressive pressuring. I've <a href="http://lpmuds.net/forum/index.php?topic=289.msg1352#msg1352">asked<br>for comments</a> on that log on the lpmuds site, because frankly,<br>I'm not sure I get his deal.<br> <br> However, I don't have to understand him in order to<br>know he'll run a reliable router. If you are uncomfortable <br>with the way I run *yatmim or even if you want a change of scenery,<br>Arren's router is a perfectly good choice. <br><br><br><span style="font-weight: bold;"><a name="update"></a>UPDATE, 7 July 2007:</span><br> By chance I ran across something that explains to me<br>the reason for Arren's behavior (aka Shevek aka Ben Mankin). <br><br>I am no longer puzzled. It appears that rudely fragmenting communities is <br>actually a habit of his. See the following urls (be patient, the wayback machine<br>can take a very long time to load pages) (Arren's text is in red):<br><br><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050206225902/moscow.6o4.ca/shevek_no_apology.html">http://web.archive.org/web/20050206225902/moscow.6o4.ca/shevek_no_apology.html</a><br><br>For context on what they're talking about: <a href="http://libspf.userfriendly.net/FAQ">http://libspf.userfriendly.net/FAQ</a><br><br>AFAICT Arren and some other guy decided to take over the name (by<br>incrementing the version number) and development of the spf<br>library, over the objections and concerns of the developer who wrote it<br>and was still maintaining it. This was seemingly done as rudely and<br>aggressively as Arren's attempted maneuver to claim primary i3 <br>router adminship.<br><br> I'm no longer so sure about recommending folks to<br>use Arren's router. It pains me to suggest affiliation<br>with someone whose behavior is chronically so meanspirited and <br>underhanded. <br><br> However, the fact remains that his router is probably a quite <br>reliable alternative, and I suppose that's all that matters.<br><br><br><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><a name="forward"></a>Going forward:</span><br><br> As I mentioned before, those unhappy with *yatmim <br>can avail themselves of <a href="http://lpmuds.net/arren_router.html">Arren's router</a>. I don't<br>know what his rules and policies are, so you'll need to<br>discuss that with him, but believe me, you won't be hurting<br>my feelings when you go :)<br> <br><br> <br><a href="http://dead-souls.net/index.html">Dead Souls Homepage</a><br><br></big></pre> </body></html>
