100!++

It isn't about bandwidth or DoS or whatnot.

Part of the discussion for MSSP has been allowing MUD Admins to adopt whatever values they want, and the listing sites use that information to fill out what they can, right?

If I don't want or care for player trend tracking, then what sense is there for it to check every half hour? For that matter, if it can't check my who list from connection, how is it supposed to track players? If it can't, what sense is there for it to check every half hour?

Its something I see becoming an annoyance, sure, and it is an annoyance I can deal with, but I think its worth considering concerns like the ones I have because if the ultimate goal is widespread adoption, then I would think giving Admins to the ability to have some level of control over the way it handles would be a smart thing in order to help facilitate more people being willing to adopt it.

Also, if widespread adoption is the goal, then I also think its important to consider what the typical coding skill level of Admins are on average. That's part of the reason why there's been a concentrated effort to keep it simple, right? I would be willing to put money on the speculation that a significant portion of the MUD Admin population would either be unable or unwilling to add who list checking from initial connection. If that is the case, then that might be one of the values or functions of MSSP that doesn't see widespread adoption.

You don't get wide spread adoption of all the features by limiting some right out of the gate ;). If you don't care for player tracking, then don't pay attention to it? Like I said, right now, the only way to opt out is to have your MUD removed from the listing. That is, until we add a way to toggle mssp on and off for the individual mud listings. We're not saying that it's not going to happen, just saying it's not going to happen right now.

Your who list has a little blurb at the bottom about the number of players connected right? There's an MSSP field that corresponds to that value. For example:



When anyone pings MW for MSSP info, the Players field for MSSP reports the same as the Visible Players on my who list. So the Crawler wouldn't need to be able to see the Who list to be able to tell, it's not that hard to add a value to count the number of active descriptors. And if you want it to be reporting just players, it's trivial to add a check for Immortals before it adds one to the variable or whatever.

I would like to point out the MSSP crawler is a multifunction crawler that also tests your mud for connectivity. If it is unable to connect within a certain time period the mud admin is sent a warning pm, then an expiry pm and the mud listing is deleted, so that our mud listings are not full of defunct. So yes, accepting the MSSP crawler /is/ a requirement, opting out is not an option. The MUD connector crawler does this as well.

The every 2 minutes connection attempt was a bug due to a misplacing in the crontab entry.

I'm with him.

I think perhaps there's some misunderstanding here of how the player count data is arrived at. When an MSSP crawler connects to get the data, the number of players connected is one of the data fields that's there. If you don't send it, then you get recorded as having 0 players. The crawler is not bound to ignore you if you don't send it. At this point, we arrive at the whole deal where if you don't want it connecting often enough to be able to do its job, don't log it, ban it, or opt out. If a crawl delay value gets thrown in, then set that to something you feel is appropriate.

Arguing about something that's been fixed is not productive though.

Clearly you are saying that this is how it is now, but are you saying that this is how it should be?

You can opt out of the crawler by not having your mud on the listings. Our value as a MUD listing site significantly decreases if all our listings are for dead defunct muds. Perhaps some time in the future we will offer an option to re-validate by email, but currently it will remain the same for the forseeable future.

I don't think you understood the question; I wasn't talking about validation. Are you saying that you are actively against letting somebody be (a) on the listing AND (b) opted out of MSSP?

?

If they don't reply with a valid MSSP response then it won't gather any MSSP data for them. I don't care if they support MSSP or not. I don't understand your angle here, you can opt out merely by not setting up MSSP in your game.

We're talking about validating MUDs on the one hand, and gathering MSSP information on the other. I think it's pretty clear that the former doesn't have to happen nearly as often as the latter. Therefore, given that some people seem to really, really dislike getting pinged often, it seems that the polite thing to do here is to let them opt out of the more frequent checks, and only have the checks that have been here all along.

http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=topi...

opt-out would be something that limits our connections per day.

You're arguing something based on how it happens to be implemented now. That's how "features" come to be. :wink: Seriously; you can always rewrite the crawler if it's behaving in some way it shouldn't be. Heck any number of people here could write a dedicated MSSP crawler rather quickly that talks to your database in whatever way it's set up.

"CRAWL DELAY"        Preferred number of hours between crawls. Send "-1" 
                     to use the crawler's default.

Would this do the trick, or does it need to be in minutes? I personally think 30 minute crawls are excessive, and someone can report 0 to indicate 'as often as you want'.

-1 should mean "don't crawl at all", and 0 should mean "whatever you want". As you currently have it, -1 and 0 mean the same thing…

But no, this does not suffice for solving Mabus's problem, as we saw in the first 10 posts of this monster. :rolleyes:

EDIT:
That said, I'm not sure a -1 response makes sense at all: if you're implementing MSSP to say don't come back, you might as well not implement it…

the wording should at least be changed to 'minimum' number of hours.

edit: i feel this is something that should be done on the mudbytes side, rather than in the protocol, especially if people are wanting to turn it off without implementing mssp.

Just implement two options:

0 You decide since it's your crawler.
1 Remove me from your freely provided MUDlist services.

I get it, comedian. Ha, ha. Funny.

I should have never PM'ed Samson that there might be an issue. I should have never come here and posted a question expecting anything but trouble.

98.20.14.106
h106.14.20.98.dynamic.ip.windstream.net
Out of Texarkana, AR.

abuse@windstream.net already has a copy of the new log, and has responded with two emails.

Very funny.

Not flamebait or anything here, but why Samson? I made the crawler and Davion was working on integration, Samson had nothing to do with it? Why PM him? Why not PM all of us?