5.2.7 Record Keeping

Your MUCK is itself a large, complex set of records, and most information you would need to record is automatically recorded, either in log files or the database itself. There is, though, one record that most administrators find extremely useful that MUCK itself has no mechanism for: player's email addresses. Life will be much easier if you religiously follow a practice of recording email addresses each time you run @pcreate. This will let you notify players of things like downtime and address changes, and — if you follow a policy of not accepting character requests from anonymous email sites such as Hotmail, Rocketmail, Yahoo, etc. — gives you some chance of identifying alternate characters controlled by the same player.

You can store this online (on the player object, in a property such as @/email), but it is more valuable to keep the record offline, so that you can access it if the MUCK goes down... which is a prime example of when you would need the players' email addresses. A flat text file works fine for this.

One other kind of record keeping may prove useful. It is occasionally necessary to issue warnings to players about AUP infringements, and the like. In order for such warnings to be a useful administrative measure, other wizards need to know about warnings you have issued. A common and workable practice is to use a program that stores administrative notes about such matters in a wizard-only propdir on player objects. With it, you can see if any other wizards have noted AUP problems with a player before you decide what an appropriate response to an incident is. (An example of such a program is provided here.)