@roz I can understand that, but IMHO constructive is constructive. If somebody posts something in the constructive zone, then the replies should be constructive. "You're a horrible person and I spit on your apology" isn't constructive, no matter how much of a horrible person they may be. (But if the mods want to move all apologies to the Gloves Off area, that's up to them.)
@roz said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
"but don't personally attack me for this terrible behavior!!"
Well I'd have to disagree in general. If someone posts a sincere "I did something horrible and I'm sorry" apology, I think that dogpiling them for the horrible thing they've already admitted to is a crappy thing to do. Splitting off to a Hog Pit thread calling BS (or a PSA type thread in the Reviews section I mentioned) seems more appropriate there.
So just for the record... the Vault Girl "apology" thread? The one where folks are literally telling each other to f-- off, jumping down each others' throats about who has more right to be upset about what, quibbling over RL gender (WTF people, it's 2018 - can we not start a war about how someone identifies online?), etc.? The one that's so blatant that people are posting actual dumpster fire GIFs? That right there is the kind of thing that those of us asking for more moderation have been talking about.
I can only assume the mods are aware of it since they've been posting in the thread. And if people haven't been flagging posts like mad, that says something too about what the community is willing to tolerate. (I didn't flag personally because I was just curious to see how far it would be allowed to go.)
Allowing Jerry Springer level crap persist in the "Mildly Constructive" forum sends a message about what behavior is allowed, and sets a tone that pervades the rest of the forums.
More constructively, I think that the "Mildly" part of "Mildly Constructive" is just too much of a gray area for people to handle, and it's too easy to stray over the line when tempers get heated. I'd suggest a reshuffling of categories:
Constructive
Gloves Off
You could maybe color-code the little icons next to the category names, or put --Constructive-- --Gloves Off-- after the thread titles to delineate which goes where.
Up to you whether all of the Gloves Off topics are opt-in like the Hog Pit or only Hog Pit / Politics. They all kinda seem the same to me. But at least making a clear distinction between Constructive/Gloves-Off sets a clear expectation about what's tolerable where.
ETA: @Ganymede did say something while I was typing this, but the flamey posts are still there for anyone wandering through Mildly Constructive to read and say: "Oh okay, this is what goes on here."
ETAx2: Someone moved it to the Hog Pit, so thank you.
@bored said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
it can never offer spontaneous encounters nor true exploration.
You make good points about the Explorer motivations, though I've always wondered how much satisfaction those folks really get from wandering through a fixed grid of anything short of giant size.
I disagree though about the lack of spontaneous encounters. I don't really see a practical difference between wandering to "Big City - Sleazy Strip" on the grid and doing scene/start Big City - Sleazy Strip=public. Both can park your character in the Sleazy Strip with a hint (in the case of a grid) or an expressed intent (in the case of the scene system) of being open to RP in that location.
I get it's not everybody's thing, and that's cool. It's different, some folks hate it. But I like the benefits.
I've become anti-grid these days. Just give me a scene system and a wiki page with a map and some established locations. Couple of reasons why...
(*) even before meetme, we had speedwalking. And the reason meetme caught on so much IMHO is because traversing the grid is not fun - it's just a boring task that gets in the way of actual RP.
@alzie said in How to type `quit` and quit PennMUSH?:
Change it to 'quit' or whatever you want. Recompile. Profit. You don't even lose your current game.
Yeah but then QUIT won't work for everyone who's been used to typing it in uppercase for 30 years. Not sure that's an improvement 
@lithium said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
I think it would give us a greater chance to get new people into the hobby too if they could just be pointed at a web page and go.
I don't disagree, which is why Ares has a web client built in and also some non-traditional ways of doing scenes via the web (more like Storium or play-by-post) on top of the traditional MUSH format.
But there've been no fewer than what - five? six? - different MU coders taking a crack at a web client that mirrors the traditional MU interface, and they're all pretty bare-bones. It's not because we all suck, it's because web development is a black hole of mismatched tools and browser incompatibilities that makes developing web apps a real nightmare sometimes. Heck, I just spent countless hours this week trying to improve the way Ares' web client connects to the game due to firewall issues with websockets. It's a ginormous time sink.
Could someone really dedicated to the problem tackle it? Sure. Slack and Discord have a web UI that's not too different than what a MUSH might look like. But they also have a whole team of developers working on it full-time -- and they're very centralized; not something you can customize to every game-runner's whim. I think we need to scale our expectations a bit.
@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
See, the way I see it if we give MUSHers something that's better than what they have they will want to use it. But it needs to be good.
Yeah we'll just have to agree to disagree. I've gotten enough feedback on "playing via web" both here on MSB and in my discussions about Ares that I really don't think most people want to play that way. And the technical challenges of implementing all of Atlantis/Potato's features on web (and more - since it has to be better) seem so great that I don't think anybody's going to want to tackle that. Time will tell I guess.
@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
So all of the features you mention would be done over the web client. Logging, spawns, dockable components, they've all been mainstays in web applications for many years now. The key is to not care about losing backward compatibility with MUSH clients.
If you don't care about losing backwards compatibility with MUSH clients then you don't care about losing backwards compatibility with MUSHers. That seems like shooting yourself in the foot to me, since it's not like we have a large population to begin with.
Maybe (hopefully!) 10, 20 years from now folks will feel differently and web will be the mainstay, but I don't see it happening in the near future. The use cases just don't line up. Even things like Discord and Slack chat, which have a lot more in common with MUSHes than most other web apps, provide desktop/mobile versions because a good majority of the userbase finds that more convenient for live-chat interaction.
As for logging, dockable components, etc... actually no, those are not 'mainstays' in web applications. Yes, they can be done, but they are clunky and require a lot of custom code. Trying to make those kinds of things responsive to different screen sizes is a royal PITA. We're not talking about professional developers here, for the most part - we're talking about hobbyists who have learned a bit of a simple scripting language (MUSHcode) or have dabbled in Ruby/Python. If you want people to be able to customize your web client for their own games, then you need to keep the code reasonably simple.
@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
The new client will be the web browser you are using right now - there's no learning curve. Nor do you need to know the difference between telnet and http for that.
I was actually talking about next-gen desktop/mobile clients. Like Atlantis3 or MUSHClient2. I really don't see the majority of MUSHers switching over to web clients any time soon. Even if we made a game-specific web client that was awesome, it would only be for that game, and folks really don't want to have a bunch of different browser tabs open for different games. Logging, spawns, dockable windows, events, highlighting ... these are all features that our MUSH clients offer that are not very conducive to developing on the web. And trying to make a web client that's both richly-featured and easily customizable for folks who aren't pro programmers? Good luck.
@magee101 The telnet connection is under the hood of your MUSH client. MUSHclient or Potato wouldn't be able to utilize the new features I'm talking about unless somebody released a new version that did so, but I'm assuming server developers wouldn't break backwards-compatibility with old clients. That would be considerably short-sighted of them considering how many MUSHers are all: "You can have my SimpleMU when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
That's one of the many, many interface improvements that even become possible with web-based clients.
Double post sorry. But it doesn't even need a web-based client. It just needs a client that's smarter than telnet(*). For instance, if there were a standard way for the game to say "yo, here's a room description" versus "here's some chat text" and "here's a pose", then the client could handle those things more sensibly. Right now the client just gets ((blob of plain ASCII text)) and we need pattern matching and other craziness to try to attach semantic meaning to it.
Once you had a standard, "smarter" client API then you could build web clients, mobile clients, and PC clients to utilize more advanced features for the servers that supported that API. (I put "smarter" in quotes because it's really not a client problem. Right now the clients are limited by the server interface.)
(*) Yes, telnet purists, I know you could technically implement a smarter API on raw telnet, but that would just be silly IMHO. It's 2018, just let telnet die already.
@krmbm said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
@three-eyed-crow said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
I sometimes wonder if web clients that spawned/separated OOC channels to a separate tab by default would help with this.
Like what Ares does?
I think @Three-Eyed-Crow maybe meant something more like what you'll see in many MMOs - a dockable chat window that can be chucked out of the way when you don't care, but otherwise stays unobtrusively off to the side somewhere.
Like in WoW for instance. (I can't believe I still have a screenshot from ages ago.)
Of course I'd love it if Ares had something cool like that. But at some point the web portal would just become so complex that maintaining it would be a full-time job. I already have one of those, thanks.
@auspice said in How to type `quit` and quit PennMUSH?:
I know FS3 has aliased 'quit' to work
It actually doesn't, because as @ixokai mentioned - you just can't make a softcode command do "QUIT". command_alias doesn't seem to work, presumably for the same reason.
Best you can do I think is a WIZ object command that aliases quit to @boot, similar to what @Ashen-Shugar suggested.
&cmd-quit wizobject=$quit:@boot %#
It tells you you've been booted, which probably isn't quite ideal, but it does disconnect you! Me? I just CTRL-E to close the world
You might also be able to do a client alias. I tried that in Atlantis and it didn't work, but that was possibly user error. I've never used the alias system before.
@three-eyed-crow said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
I feel like that's gone out of fashion as the hobby's become older and more insular but, through the foggy mists of time, I remember it being quite helpful.
Yeah, my suggestion was hardly an original idea. Twenty years ago it wasn't uncommon for folks to just wander in from MUDs or from BBS RP or whatnot, so I think we as a community were better at bringing those people on board.
The technical issues we can solve. The cultural ones are harder.
@thatguythere OK? I mean everybody's different. If the purpose of MUSHing is to collaboratively write a story, I fail to see how doing it asynchronously "serves no real purpose". If it's not fun for you, nobody's making you do it. It's still an option for other folks who have a scheduling conundrum.
@thatguythere said in What is your turning point?:
no matter how important our scene may be I will take sure RP at 8 over possible RP later. Or even this tv program looks interesting at 9 over maybe RP at 9:30.
And I don't mind at all if someone does that. That's the whole point of it not being a commitment. Sometimes people multi-scene with alts to get around the "oh I started another scene five minutes before you logged in..." problem, but it's okay if they don't like to split their attention that way. I'm pretty flexible.
I'm not saying nobody should schedule RP. If that's what works for you, groovy. But for me - it's just added stress I don't need in my life over a game.
We RP because it's fun - it's the point of the game. But I'm a firm believer in the fact that RP should never be required. Our character's exist in the game world 24/7 and just because the players can't sync up, that doesn't mean the characters can't. You can always work something out. Tech can help too. Ares supports a Google-doc/play-by-post style of scene RP that lets you RP asynchronously. It's not as fun as the 'live' style, but it's handy when people have busy schedules and can't get together.
@sockmonkey said in What is your turning point?:
how you can move specific plots along without scheduling some scenes in advance.
+mail Bob=The Thing/Got your IC message. My char would definitely try to meet with you about it. Let's try to sync up this week if we can. If not I suggest we ((backscene/off-camera/say we ICly missed each other/G-Doc RP/whatever fits the circumstances)). I'm usually on weeknights after 9:30EST unless my kids lose their minds or work explodes.
Then I make it my priority to RP with Bob if he's around, over other RP. If it doesn't happen, hey that's life. There's always a way to move the plot along somehow, even if it means a few +mails back and forth negotiating an outcome.
But really, the most you're going to get out of me is "I'll try to be there". I just don't like to do hard RP commitments.
@lotherio said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
how does it get to less overwhelming and welcoming?
Well, I think changing some paradigms in our tools will help. Like, it's a heck of a lot easier to say "click here to play via the web browser" than trying to explain how to install a MU client and whatnot. People will more easily grok a web-based game forum than Myrddin's BBS commands. And it's a heck of a lot easier to say "scene/start <location> starts a scene" than to try and explain the grid and rooms, as @WildBaboons mentioned.
Beyond that, I think staged tutorials are better than Wall O Text. Have an 'escape chute' from your welcome room and your wiki landing page that screams out: "If you're new to MUSHing - start here" and walk them through the necessary topics bit by bit.
Bonus points for multimedia. Storium has a really neat interactive tutorial btw, and I did one for FS3 Combat. I tried to do a series of Youtube videos for my Ares introduction but they kinda sucked. It's not my forte. But I think that would be a great project for someone with a good "announcer voice" who's comfortable speaking on-camera.
Double bonus points for folks who are dedicated to mentoring. Again, to use Storium as an example, they have dedicated "beginner games" run by mentors who help people learn the ropes. (There hardly ever are any, which is sad, but it's still a sound idea.)
Having an in-game way to self-identify as a beginner might help too. Then if you wander into a private scene, folks know that you don't know better and hopefully won't bite your head off.
Then we need more games and a way to find them. I hope that Ares and Evennia will make it easier to build a game, and both come with dedicated game directories.
@thatonedude said in What is your turning point?:
I never mind a: <name> waves. or <name> salutes. or <name> pages, "Hey hey, how goes?"
Everyone else thinks this is bad?
I don't mind. I do the same. I mean, like... you're just saying hi. Isn't that what folks traditionally do when someone arrives?
Now if within the first five minutes it's like: "Hi! You ready to do that scene we talked about?" then yeah -- dude, chill.
Tangentially - Scheduled RP makes me uncomfortable. It just doesn't mesh well with folks who have RL unpredictability -- kids, migraines, work call, whatever. I'll just end up stressing out over potentially disappointing someone and then having to apologize for it. Big events - yeah, I view that as a necessary evil. But for day to day stuff I'll see you when I see you.
