Oh – I thought you were talking about the MUD implementing a simple webserver, not just outputting a file to the web directory. In that case, ok, even though it would mean that the spider in question has to do screen scraping over all these different 'who' formats to figure out how many players there are.


EDIT: but if we're already having people add something, they could just be told to output in a given format…

Ya, if it were going to be a feature, it wouldn't be nice pretty html, I'd imagine it something more like xml. Kinda like an rss feed for your MUDs who list.

IMC2 does this as well. Either way, it's hella easier than RFC'ing a new API across the mud world.

The main drawback is that it's incredibly easy to manipulate such a system with playerbots.
I can load my mud with 200 playerbots trivially, none of them idle, all of them on 24/7.

-Crat
http://dead-souls.net/ds-admin-faq.html#...

I'm not actually sure if asking somebody to install and maintain an IMC connection is that much easier than a snippet API that would take just a few lines of code to implement. :wink: (At least just for the 'who' thing, that is.)

:) Shows to go ya that we can all use a little
practice thinking of The Mudding Community in
terms of everyone, not just our little corner.

My statement assumes that intermud client availability
is basically universal and simple. Obviously this
is not the case, though in my little patch of the
mudding community, it's so normal as to be weird
if you don't have it.

On the other hand, "snippets" are usually of
limited use among the type of mud I'm accustomed
to, because of the wildly divergent syntaxes and
customizations between them. If the snippets are
C or C++, then fuggedabouit.

I would suggest that for LPMuds and perhaps others,
intermud polling would be simpler than asking everyone
to figure out how to make their code comply with
the API.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Actually intermud3 has much better support for it. In IMC2 I think you would send the 'who'-packet. What that does is to return a MUD-formatted who-list. It means you would need to write a pretty clever parser to figure out the player names so you could count them, assuming it doesn't return some player count. The intermud3 protocol seem to return an entire list of players instead which should make it much easier to count.

Well if it's easier to get the information desired by spitting out just a raw list of players and staff online at a given moment it's not hard to implement new packets. Getting people to upgrade to clients that support them is hard :P

People can do that now just so their game listings on various boards show a better number then 0-10. One game i can think of on top of my head actually shows dead linked players on the who list just to make it look like the game has a lot more people online than it really does and in another situation of a game where i was an immortal on there was a special room which housed a number of mobiles whose names were hard coded into the who list. There are a myriad of ways to make a who list look much bigger than it is and for those without much in the way of scruples will always find a way to be dishonest.

As this is something that could benefit everyone involved, having 1 protocol that is open would be a good thing also that could be used without restriction by TMC, MM, TMS to name just the big 3, this would increase exposure and aid in uptake by games, It might also mean that some of the burden could be moved to other quarters.

When i posed the question about tossing ideas about, my first thought also went to IMC et al, as you can already find out who is online at various games. Davion's idea of using the web as a way to extract the data is a good one and rather simple and was not one that i thought of and DH mentioned using sub negotiation that would IMO be the most eloquent of solutions posed and i am assuming that it would not require much work to adapt the existing spiders to receive the data while only hitting the welcoming screen. Maybe this is something that could be explored further.

I think Samson's point on trouble to get people to update imc2 client is valid. Adding yet a telnet negotiation might not be something most MUDs would like to do. You would have to throw a pretty tasty carrot at those MUDs. For example daily highscore list on what MUD has most players online on the TMC frontpage. However in general only the larger MUDs would really benefit from this.

Nobody would really like to do anything "just because". I think the presumption is that people doing this are opting in to this new automated data collection system.

I'd do it. but I've only ever got between 2-4 imms on at a time. unless there's a staff meeting then I make it to 9 usually.

I think that in itself is the point and you would only find that muds that are serious about what they do and opt into such a scheme and that something like this would be allow players to know when someone is online. What game portals do with the data is another question, but i could see it being used in a few different ways, tho if it was to become another VOTING type tool, then i could see it being an absolute failure as everyone would try encourage people to stay online just to skew the data. The point would be to provide meaningful data to players not just another popularity to be displayed on the front page.




I think i have the simplest solution to this, hijack the first 3 characters of the welcome screen and place a number there that the spiders can read. On the part of games it would require the addition of one line of code, certainly nothing too taxing for even the newbiest of coders and would allow for accurate auditing of anyone who was trying to fake it. The first 3 chars of the welcome screen is not a lot to give up and would not effect the ascii art in too great a way.

Wouldn't work for me. My Greetings/Welcome Screens (yes plural) are file based. and are just read out of the file. helpfiles for me have ben MySQLified, and it was easy to display a file than to make it pull the greeting from the database each time.

They'd be code generated and sent prior to greetings ;)

My ancient lump of a mud just sets up a secondary port that does a who and exits if you connect.

telnet wiley.shadowlord.org 3001

It will almost certainly tell you there are 0 visible players, but hey… it works. Any spider worth a a fart can use a regex to parse out the bit that shows the actual player count if people actually did this.

Back when the mud was running for real, and people were online, this was the quick and easy way to see if your friend was on without having to log all the way in to check.

I wrote a script, years ago, that pulled listings from TMC and stored them in an SQL database. It then did a telnet there and captured the ANSI login screen (if any) and turned that into a .PNG. You could thus see a list of muds with their login screens and when they were last checked.

I don't run the crawler on a regular basis, it was mostly to play around with perl and php code, but the idea's perfectly fine. If anyone wants to look, and my ISP isn't blocking https today, here's a link.