Best posts made by Chime

@Arkandel said:

Just for the lols, could you clarify who 'they' were or what 'shitting porcupines' entailed in this case please?

Just general raving about how wora was a hive of scum and villainy (which is moderately true) and that various bad things (doxing) happened to various people at various times. The idea that someone might set up another mush-related forum which might or might not have a different emphasis and character was completely alien and incomprehensible to them.

No, I won't say who. I can't tell anyway; I swear they shuffle city names every month or so, but there are plenty of good people left and mocking an entire game for a handful of people freaking out over a source of past trauma seems... well, wora-ish.

We can do better than that; focus on the constructive.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

He will pretty much chat code even when you don't want! Or are unsuspecting of the code!

Can confirm! ...but it's actually rather nice. I can't always help, but often the sudden popup of zomg random code exuberance really helps make the day better.

Most scenes benefit a great deal from having multiple competent storytellers that can cooperate in an ad-hoc fashion to improve the detail and interest of a narrative.

But then again, I'm more the narrativist-type than the simulationist-type.

I find MMOs to be a FANTASTIC idea-- and I've played on many of them, dating back to UltimaOnline. CORP POR

...but I find them absolutely soulcrushingly boring for the most part. It wasn't until World of Warcraft-- which many argue sort of perfected the genre-- that I realized they had flawlessly perfected most all of the parts that I hated.

More useful that emoji images would be spoiler-folding.

@Thenomain said:

As I said, if expected behavior was to have each person's comments hidden, then the accepted nomenclature for this is 'bcc'. Accepted as in older than aJobs or even Mud.

Even the earliest mailspec I could find (okay, without looking very hard), RFC 733:

               STANDARD FOR THE FORMAT OF

              ARPA NETWORK TEXT MESSAGES(1)




                    21 November 1977

Has mention of bcc with the traditional semantics in section IV: Semantics, subsection B: Reference Specification Fields, heading 3: Receiver fields, item b. This was a codification of much earlier mail semantics from early arpanet days, likely dating back to research from circa 1965.

That said, cc stands for carbon-copy, and so bcc is blind carbon copy, and I believe both were in use within business and governmental offices in at least the US by the 1940s. I don't have a citation for that though-- and I suspect one of those hideous style manuals would be a better place to track the origins of the term.

@Melpomene said:

@Chime If you ever get around to doing that, gimme.

@Thenomain tells me I need to give him a hardcode @whence command first. (tells you where the command you specify is defined, which is rather unexpectedly useful for taking a quick look at whatever bug people are complaining about today...)

Have you got that vtables function documented anywhere? I would've used it if I'd known you didn't have to specify column widths, but the code I found didn't include documentation and taking apart someone else's code is always a PITA. I just want to know what format it expects things in.

I had it beautifully expanded and documented on WORA. sigh.

Really, what you see is what you get.

vtable( LIST ) is expected to work for simple cases; the 0-default column count will decide on its own what a sensible column count for the data and screen is.

I found myself (mostly out of sheer "I CAN code so I WILL code!") making the equivalent of vtables in a different way: it expects a string formatted with two delimiters like so: a|b|c|d~e|f|g~h|i|j|k|l~m|n|o~p|q|r|s|t~u|v|w~x|y|z - and the two delimiters, and it outputs the whole set as a list of columns, fitting them to whatever width is available.

One of the MUSH codebases had a hardcode format function (of some name) that looked much like that. Probably Penn or RHOST.

Gimme if you've got it, reinventing the wheel is fun but I'm not sure I'm doing the world any good.

If you can use it from what I've explained already, you're welcome to it. If not, well, it's broken and you get to keep both pieces.

@Arkandel said:

Sometimes you have a problem. You figure you'll use a regex to fix it. Now you have two problems.

(says someone who uses regexes every day. )

They are quick and effective, but for anything of significant complexity, I prefer language that allow easy expression of more complex parsing algorithms. Yes, C/C++ has flex/bison (or lex/yacc if you are truly desperate and your time machine is stuck in the 70s or something). Java has ANTLR, or whatever. Those are effective if you're trying to write a compiler, but tend to be a bit clunky and I've found there is a very large functionality gap between "I'm writing a compiler with multi-file contextual grammar." and "heyyy a few regexes will do fine."

The sweet-spot seems to be language that can readily express simpler recursive-descent or similar parsers without having to break into a whole new language (like bison does). Haskell's Parsec and AttoParsec modules do a fantastic job of fitting exactly into that niche-- especially when combined with the applicative functors module. Being able to add recursive grammar for handling string escapes and other important details make for a huge functionality improvement over more primitive systems like regexs.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

! Test spoiler
! Testtesttest
what

This is ridiculous. Oh. Wait. Okay, this will do nicely.

@Arkandel said in Mud Hosting, for 0 budget?:

@DnvnQuinn Even so - for running a MU* the hardware requirements are pretty lax. Running Linux might be your bottleneck though - I don't know if you can run it on Windows, never tried.

Mux runs on windows; gotta use Brazil's version though.

No, it isn't really a legit means of running a game for more than early development purposes, but it's better than nothing. I guess.

Still trying to identify details, but both Mechanipus-Fremont servers are unreachable at this point. Suspected routing problem within HE-Fremont. Games affected:

crossover medieval nocturne statuvariabilis tgg whrofh goetia belleauwood oldandnew thedrift fnt masseffect julesletters muffinmu magicplays dystopia cofab cmuffin wildcard nolabigeasy chaoticcosmos clockwork hermworld battlemux pony rifts spellbound suicidechilde cotl hpb dcfallen eldritch reno arrakis darkspires darkwater stromm nevermore uumux republic thereach reach2 spacething

No ETA available at this time.

Hmm. A Buffy game, you say. http://imgur.com/gallery/CBT9q

The adverts board (and even looking at some adverts messages, like this one), is quite broken on Chrome for me.

Reloading seeeeeems to fix it, sometimes, but it is a recurring problem.

@Tat said in How should we (as a community) handle MediaWiki:

I'm personally less interested in the 'easy to get up and running the way you want' than I am the 'easy to use once it is' - I'm happy to put in a lot of work at the get-go to get a wiki that doesn't require much upkeep or handholding on my part. I get that not everyone thinks this way, though.

Well yes. Ultimately the setup should be to ask the owner a few questions in some web form, have them push a button, and bam-- a wiki-- with zero interaction on my part.

For hosting providers like me

I don't have much to say on this one - we simply went from paying for space for a webpage to paying for space for a wiki. I installed it (a process I found absurdly easy) and customized it (definitely a lot of work to get to the level we're at now, though I keep stealing things from old wikis at this point).

I'm definitely curious about where your frustration points are.

Heh. Well-- you pointed out it'd be nice for these things to be hands-off. They aren't. Not remotely.

Game owners like to have these things-- wiki, forum, etc. and they never conceive of the idea that they should keep them up to date and patched from vulnerabilities.

PHP and virtually everything written in it has an atrocious track-record on the security side. So do many other things, and I don't really see a lot of good wiki alternatives that don't use PHP, but that developer ecosystem is particularly bad and has been so since its creation.

Individual game owners do not keep things up to date, and never will. Do they have the permissions? Yes. Can they? No. It isn't hard, but they just won't do it.

That leaves it to me to do when necessary, or to pull sites down. Upgrading 30 different wikis with incompatible config files and breakage points manually is kinda hellish, especially when people then feel entitled to blame me because their shit broke when I updated it.

That's not going to work. It can't scale, and I can't waste that much time on stupid php crap. The discussion here was to get a better sense of how all these wikis (within mechanipus and elsewhere) are being used, so that when I have a new mediawiki deployment and management feature it will do what people need it to do. A list of Extensions-- which many people have provided-- helps quite a bit.

End goal is to have a single mw install with a tiny php stub in each user's site that sets it up to run as their wiki and holds their config. There will be only one copy of the main Extensions list, one copy of all the normal mw source and language files, etc. That way, when they send out yet another warning email saying oops-we-blew-it-again, I can trivially update that one install.

If what you're aiming for is a game-in-a-box that includes a mediawiki install, I'd probably suggest a basic install with a few additional extensions up and running, and a depository somewhere of easy-to-tweak templates for commonly used things like character pages or logs.

Yep. Both for use for games I choose to host and usable as a package for people rolling their own somewhere, or for hosting companies that want to leverage these ideas for-profit. Any and all of those are fine.

The extensions I'd call must-haves are

• Arrays

Hm! Yes, that looks interesting.

• DPL (IF not using Semantic Wiki - I'd consider Semantic advanced MediaWiki'ing)

DPL, yes, though I've been sold on Semantic.

• Parser Functions
• WikiEditor
• Input Box

Yep.

• Confirm Edit with QuestyCaptcha plug-in

I don't particularly like captchas, but automated spam deterrents are necessary, so this is probably essential. Question based ones are certainly better than the "identify something like a word in this picture of abstract noise."

If you're being really nice, I'd also include a skin that isn't the god-awful Monobook.

Vector is included in the default install, for a while now. Most new wikis default to that. Anything using Monobook is horrendously antique.

I'm not sure if this really gets at what you're asking - these are the reasons we stick with MediaWiki and why I like it, anyway.

Thank you. This is wonderful and useful information.

@Derp That's likely a function of which games are correctly configured to autostart. Yell at @thenomain, maybe...

He'll probably ask me to fix it tho.

@Thenomain ...maybe, but @JinShei and I spent a while talking about it too. Poor girl's gettin it from all sides.

I try to keep things constructive and helpful. I really missed the positive social aspects of WORA and had become moderately adept at ignoring the hateful nonsense. I was pointing out the existence of this place to various staff channels and... well, I got an earful. Or eyeful, or something.

Suffice it to say some people are still traumatized by mean things that were said on WORA. I'm not really certain where the fault lies there, or if I care, or if anything can be done about it-- but certainly keeping things as friendly and constructive as possible is usually a good step no matter what's going on.

That said, it's with some amusement that I note that the FINAL STRAW that made me forever abandon the old WORA was that argument about hosting problems. I remember stating very clearly that it was usually down and as a result, many people were leaving and WORA was effectively closed. Even Pedantic agreed with me, which is moderately unprecedented. HelloRaptor though-- he mocked the whole idea and stated something to the effect that people say that all the time.

Well. I was right, you bastard. So there! But please do come back because you said otherwise interesting things, usually.

@Derp Sigh. Try now.

@Jaunt said:

One of the biggest issues with older MU* Engines is their restrictive licensing.
Most older engines do not allow them to be used for the purpose of creating for-profit games. Evennia does not have that restriction.

Independent of the "discussion" above, I think this freer licensing is a good thing. I've met Stallman, and it was a wonderfully reaffirming moment for my preference toward BSD/MIT/etc style licensing.

RHost had a fairly restrictive model a while back-- with an NDA required, etc. Once you talk to them though, they were pretty friendly and really only wanted to establish proper attribution, which is a good thing to do in any case.

As for a run-down of modern MUSH-family licensing, see the licensing markdown file in my mux fork for details. In rough summary, most of the code bases have borrowed very heavily from each other and have code lineage going back to the original tinymud and concept lineage dating back to PDP-10 era Muddle and the like. (36bit mainframes ftw!) Artistic License seems to be the standard there.

Artistic License regrettably may prohibit certain types of commercial activity. Relicensing code that has copyrights and contributions from large numbers of users over many decades isn't feasible. BUT we can certainly talk about lessons learned and how we can use those ideas to make newer technologies better.

In general though, the big advantage of a python-based mu system is... python. No one who has looked at mushcode, muf/mpi, moocode, etc can seriously disagree.

@Catsmeow said:

If you don't log, you get screwed.

Player logs are ultimately meaningless and easily forged. There are various ways to do server-side logging to line checksums or the like, but people either think it's some spy game or too complicated.

But yes-- it's essential to keep your own logs independent of what the server has.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/MediaWiki_1.20_(44edaa2)_database_schema.svg/2500px-MediaWiki_1.20_(44edaa2)_database_schema.svg.png

That's a the schema diagram for the tables that mediawiki sets up. You need to do a series of joins to "look up" a wiki page, then some text transformations for formatting.

I'd say ask someone to grab a decompile of Wikinewshelp on the reach, but honestly that was some of my very first mushcode and it needs to be thrown out. The core thing you want is:

&QUERY.NEWSHELP #1025=select page_touched,old_text from wiki_page inner join wiki_revision on page_latest=rev_id inner join wiki_text on rev_text_id=old_id where page_namespace=%0 and page_title='%1'

But I suspect @Thenomain is the one to ask as it's been changed many many times since I've looked at it.