[MudNet-Announce] Upgrade plans

[Robby Griffin]

In January 2001, I shut down the MudNet service (3.2b) with no
intention of bringing it back up until I felt it was worth using.
After making a couple of changes (disabling the comsys, requiring a
hostkey in every command), and receiving plenty of positive feedback
about the service, I decided to compromise and leave the bot running
in a partially improved state (3.3b) while I worked on it.

It's taken longer than I thought to make the necessary improvements,
mainly due to sore wrists. I'm working more carefully these days, and
I'm pleased to announce that we'll be switching to MudNet 4.0a (yes,
that's 'a' as in alpha, because I haven't tested and polished it as
much as I would have liked) over the next couple of weeks.

I'm planning to prerelease the new softcode on June 2. Please read it
over (lots of comments), but don't throw away the old one just yet. As
with the change from 3.2b to 3.3b, this is going to be a required
upgrade due to incompatible command-handling paradigms, so the 4.0a
softcode will not work with the 3.3b bot and vice versa. Unless anyone
spots a serious flaw, there will be no changes to the June 2 softcode
before we update the bot.

I'll update the bot itself to 4.0a on June 9 (these are both
Saturdays), as close as possible to 5pm EDT, at which point everyone
will need to begin using the new softcode.

I've just subscribed a ton of people to mudnet-announce, so I hope to
avoid a flood of "why doesn't my old softcode work?" messages that
evening. I think the 4.0a bot will log out immediately if your world
still has the old softcode after 5pm on June 9, since the first thing
it does is try to invoke some softcode to make sure stuff is working.

Changes in this release:

  - New multi-channel comsys in softcode.

  - Relay commands work asynchronously as previously described at
    http://www.mudnet.org/pipermail/mudnet-announce/2001q1/000004.html

  - New general locking mechanism -- we evaluate the victim's mnlock
    before executing a relay command. More details will appear on the
    webpage on June 2.

  - MudNet Power Globals are not used. You can write a replacement
    if you want, but people should be able to set their own mnlocks.

  - MudNet's Stuff is not required. The bot will be @triggering stuff
    on the MudNet player and will no longer require $-commands on
    itself or a helper object.

  - MudNet Globals will send dbrefs to the bot to allow better tracking
    of enactors.

  - The bot is more friendly toward !connected or non-player users,
    using @pemit by dbref instead of paging players by name.

  - mnlist syntax has changed; the existing keywords must be prefixed
    with a dash, and any other keyword will be interpreted as the start
    of a world name (as in mnworld). I'll eventually add keyword support
    to mnworld also, using the same syntax.

  - The hostkey (VK attribute) must be set on the MudNet player as
    well as the MudNet Globals.

  - Possibly more restrictive spam detection, we'll have to keep an
    eye on this.

If there is sufficient interest I'll run a 24-hour test of the new bot
on June 7, using a different name (say, MudNet4) and command prefix
(mn4worlds, anyone?). This would not interrupt service on the existing
MudNet. Send me mail if you're willing to do some testing, and I'll
decide next week what to do about it.

Please send other feedback to mudnet@mudnet.org, and feel free
to use the mudnet-users@mudnet.org list for discussion. See
  http://www.mudnet.org/mailman/listinfo/mudnet-users
for more information.

	--Alierak