A welcome from Silver
 ---------------------

For the majority of time in EW2 talkers there had always been two
choices. On one side was the solid (but ultimately dull) SensiSummink and
the other, the packed with features (but buggy) Playground 96. Since the
appearance of PG96 over two years ago it would be fair to say that it has
taken the talker world by storm.

However PG96 always had its critics. It was buggy, prone to crashing at
the most unwelcome of times (such as removing someones privs) and had what
could be described as sloppy code. Netherless people took to PG96,
because despite all its faults, it was something SensiSummink couldn't
never really manage to be - fun.

Now the demands of spods on talker coders and admins mean that using a
two year old base code is not likely to help new talkers grow and expand.
Residents want more games, more commands, more abilities, the intercom,
channels and such. Admins demand saved warnings, ident server, decent
superuser and admin channels, more power and more control. These are all
features that are not available or poorly implemented in PG96.

Playground Plus attempts to change this by bringing the PG code up-to-date
and on par with SensiSummink. No longer will users have to make the choice
between good code with no features or code with features but prone to
crash.

This code has been substantially cleaned and tidied up and whilst is by no
means perfect it wont crash due to silly little things. Nothing is perfect
and I wouldn't claim this code is - there will always be the odd bug
lurking about and if you let me know then I can sort it out.

This code is fully endorsed by the original PG96 team and is officially
seen as the next logical progression in the PG saga to the extent that a
large amount of effort has been made to make sure that it is backwardly
compatible with PG96.

I hope you enjoy the code, both running it and coding it. I can't say that
I have always enjoyed coding it since there have been several times where
I've felt like saying "bugger it" and deleting the whole directory. It is
for that reason that I would like to thank my good friends Geoffrey
Swift (aka blimey) who provided a great deal of help with getting this
code into shape and bug free when I was totally lost, Chris Allegretta
(aka Astyanax) who provided support and advice, Phypor (aka j. bradley
christian) for donating a huge amount of code, bug fixes and time and
Patrick Evans (aka Spire) who wrote the nifty installer script, new
makefiles and a smart new process_output function. Also John Whiting
should not be left out for kindly providing a server to test the code on
and for the webpages to reside on.

Additional thanks should go to all those who contributed code to the
project, the beta testing crew (all 150 of them!) who endured numerious
changes to commands, code and the odd whopper of a bug, the members of the
angel mailing list and those who admined the Playground Plus test site
more than I ever did.

Finally I wish to thank all those who coped with my moaning, winging,
depression, buggy code and frequent mails asking questions and getting
advice.

	Richard Lawrence (aka Silver)
	silver@ewtoo.org
	16th June 1998