ON THE PURPOSE OF A MUSH
ON THE ROLE OF A TINYPLOT COORDINATOR
ON THE USE OF RETCON
ON GROUP ACTIVITIES
ON MANDATORY DEAD TIME
THIS PAGE
ON MANDATORY E-MAIL REGISTRATION
| ON THEME | ON CHARACTERS | ON CONSENT |
| ON ADMINISTRATION | ON CODING IDEAS | ON GEOGRAPHY |
| ON COMMUNICATIONS | ON ROLEPLAY | ON MAGIC |
| ON IC ORGANIZATIONS | MAIN PAGE |
Send feedback on these pages HERE.
Reasons for doing it this way include:
1) If you have limits on the number of characters a single Player can have at once, or perhaps on the number of "special" characters such as Features or Royalty or other "elite" varieties, e-mail registration makes it a bit easier to spot cheaters.
2) If anything disastrous happens (the server drops dead, the database is destroyed, etc.) then having a list of e-mail addresses gives you a way of rapidly contacting your players to explain what has happened and assure them that even if they can't connect right now, the mush is not dead and is expected to be back up at such-and-such a time (or has already moved to a new site, at least temporarily, or whatever action you have taken to address the problem).
3) On a related note, one approach is to rig it so that everyone who registers an e-mail address is AUTOMATICALLY added to your mush's ongoing mailing list, unless and until they take the trouble to Unsubscribe. This approach takes advantage of the basic laziness of many people when it comes to mailing lists . . . they may have the vague idea that it would be fun to subscribe one of these days, but they often never get around to doing anything about it.
4) If you feel generous, you can rig it so that any Player whose character is nearing the point of being removed from the database for idleness (30 days without a single login, let's say) can receive a warning message reminding him of the threat to his character's life and limb, in case he has just let it slip his mind due to RL concerns but still wants to keep the character alive for future use.
5) There is one school of thought that feels that requiring someone to register an e-mail address in the first place will serve as a deterrent to twinkish or hacking behaviors, i.e. it puts a Player on notice that he will be held responsible for his actions.
Reasons why you might not want to bother with mandatory e-mail registration:
1) Duplicate e-mail accounts are easily obtained, so if your main goal is to prevent duplication (not letting anybody have two Features based out of two different accounts, for instance), it's probably a lost cause to do it just based on e-mail addys. For instance, a quick look at http://www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Internet_Services /Email_Providers/Free_Email/ lists 41 providers of free e-mail (PLUS two links to other indexes of free e-mail providers). Of these 41, a few are "prominent" enough on the Internet that I had heard of them before, and perhaps you have too - geocities, hotmail, juno, and the like - but most are obscure enough that it is not evident at a glance that they are "free" and thus any dishonest citizen could probably create as many accounts as he liked on any one of them. If you want to be really stern about this, you would have to refuse to accept any e-mail address on ANY of these free sources as valid, which a) would require a lot of time to set up and maintain because there are so many possible sources, and b) would alienate many potential Players with low incomes and/or very limited Net access, such as many legal minors, who connect to the Internet via somebody else's account (a parent or legal guardian's, for instance) but have been forbidden to give out that account holder's e-mail address (usually for fear of getting spammed as soon as their e-mail addy becomes public knowledge), so that the free sources - hotmail and the like - are the only ways they can have e-mail of their own without coughing up money they can't really afford to squander to get their own accounts elsewhere.
2) "Time is money." The more time you spend compiling lists of e-mail addresses, updating such lists, writing code to issue automatic messages to every person who registers, worrying about bounced messages as e-mail addresses become invalid over time, etc., then the less time you have for matters more "directly" related to the administration of your mush. Whether or not it's worth it to you to keep track of everybody's e-mail is a personal decision based on just what your priorities are in this enterprise.
Some Wizards occasionally feel it necessary to toad somebody, but prefer not to publicize individual cases unless, perhaps, someone makes a big public scene about it. Let's look at some of the reasons for each side of the issue:
REASONS TO KEEP IT QUIET
If you habitually publish accounts of who has been toaded and why, people may think that you are bloodthirsty and prone to toad anybody at the drop of a hat, and that each toading contains a veiled threat: "You had better lick my boots, lackey, or I'll toad YOU too!" This presumably is not your intention, but that doesn't mean they won't suspect the worst of you.
REASONS TO ADVERTISE IT
Sometimes it happens that a player voluntarily leaves the mush, possibly because of personal differences with other players and/or Wizards/Admins, but doesn't bother to do anything to publicize his reasons for leaving. In due time his character is erased from the database for inactivity (or he may even have mailed the Wizards telling them to go ahead and do it as soon as they like, since he definitely won't be coming back). After a while his roleplaying friends notice he isn't around anymore, and may leap to the erroneous conclusion that he was "forced" out, or even nuked from the database without warning, by vindictive Wizards due to differences of opinion, serious or trivial, which he may have had with the Powers That Be in the past. Once this sort of rumor gets started, it's very difficult to pin it down and put an end to it. In fact, the Wizards may not even realize such a rumor has started until virtually everyone else has heard the story. This can cause no end of trouble. On the other hand, if your players know from the start that you are providing a guaranteed-accurate list of all those who have actually been forcibly removed for bad behavior, it should reduce the amount of groundless speculation about who MIGHT have been thus punished.
If you can maintain a modicum of credibility with them, then they will be prepared to take it on faith that if someone isn't on the list of "Officially Toaded Characters," it means he wasn't "forced" to leave - he just happened to depart for his own good reasons.