While looking over several codebases earlier trying to find inspiration for a couple of systems I'm attempting to write, I noticed the one actively employed something that I can only explain as a subversive way to log every action every input into the mud. It appeared to do this in ADDITION to the standard command logging prevalent in Diku/Merc/Smaug. Now, this isn't a public codebase, it was given to me several years ago after I offered to aid in revising some of the systems of the game in question, but shortly thereafter it went offline inexplicably and never returned, so I filed it away in a dark corner and only pulled it out recently because I was looking for a bit of inspiration and upon discovering this, it got me thinking. Knowing this is/was out there, makes me skeptical of discussing anything important as a player on a mud. Especially given that after compiling, running, and testing, this codebase even logged tells between players. The only thing it appeared to ignore were mobs inputting commands. Movement, emotes, says, channels, tells, everything logged.

Given that I enjoyed playing the mud in question, and with that in mind I won't name it, or the owner/coder, but I have to admit, this makes me view that mud with a bit of skepticism. Was the owner excessively paranoid? Worried about what players really thought? Worried that they were telling him one thing, and telling each other a different thing? Personally I find this kind of behavior in a game unacceptable, and I hope this is by no means normal. But what are the rest of your opinions? Is this acceptable? Is this normal?

IMO it would depend on the type of MUD. If it was an RP MUD, where people emoted etc to their hearts content, then immortals occasionally checked the logs to see how things are going, I wouldn't be surprised to discover this. However if it is more H'n'S then I cannot really see much of a reason for it beyond paranoia.

Edit to add: While we don't log this sort of thing on DBAT, staff can see tells between other players (only tells to Implementers are private) so we can monitor whether or not people are sharing IC info (which on the MUD is against the rules, I actually encourage people to go do it on MSN if they really, really have to do it :tongue:). While it's not the same thing, it has produced a similar reaction from some people when they discover that staff can see their tell conversations.

This wasn't really an RP Mud. It was more H'n'S/PK.

Well, logging is an essential tool in debugging. When you look at logging, it should be "what the codebase does and why". Logging all input by players indiscriminately is just part of logging.

So you're saying logging everything input into the mud, even tells, is ok?

Yes. Don't most codebases come with a way to turn on all logging? That would include (but is not limited to!) every player input command.

I'm not talking about doing this for debugging purposes. This was code written that had no way of being disabled from within the game. This was a constant logging, of everything input.

The codebase I maintain has an option to do this. I don't regard this feature as
being anything but a fully normal administrative tool for debugging and rule
enforcement. I'd expect most in-production muds to have a similar feature
available, if not enabled.

Since 1993 my assumption has been that admins can see anything I do on
a mud, and can also log it all for review later. I therefore do not tell secrets
while playing on a mud I do not own. People who tell secrets, or netsecks,
or…whatever…while on someone else's mud know or should know that
they run the nonzero risk of being administratively observed.

From an OMG MY PRIEVASY standpoint, I think that the chances of your
netsecks being observed are pretty predictable. If the mud is run by a
grownup with a family and full time job, and it's a mud with more than a
few people on throughout the day, chances are there is so much crap
going on in so many sessions that nobody bothers to read the logs unless
the mud crashed, some error was reported, or someone complains about
your behavior. Where you run a real risk of having your snuggle tiem
exposed is when being careless on a mud run by a 16 year old with
no life of his own, wishing to live vicariously through others.*

But then…what are you doing netsecksing in such a place?

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

* Sound familiar, Dean?

Ya… that's what logging is. User input is only a small part of logging though. If that's all that was being logged, and there's some sort of extensive system built around strictly player logging, then well, that'd be a bit much. Pretty narrow scope of actual logging.

This was in addition to the standard logging available in Smaug derivatives.

Smaug derivatives have an option to turn on comprehensive logging. But I guess my question pertains more towards is it too much if there's no way to turn it off rather than just if it's there and toggle-able. I can see needing to log all input for tracking down a bug or something similar. But I guess doing it just because doesn't seem all that reasonable to me.

From an outsider's perspective, I really don't see a difference between having comprehensive logging permanently enabled, or just having the capability to comprehensively log. Either one raises the same issues of trust and possibility for abuse by the operators of the MUD, and carries the same risk since I have to assume that logging can be enabled at any time, if it's not already. There's simply no way I can personally expect privacy on a game I don't control. Whether or not logging actually takes place, either permanently or temporarily, or the scope of such logging, or the notification of such logging, has no real relevance to how I choose to behave since, from a privacy standpoint, every byte I send to someone else's system is in the hands of the enemy.

Usually, I tend to believe that logging is taking place on some level, and also that the administrators have more important things to do than sift through my personal conversations digging for any sort of dirt on me or my associates. Then again, I've also played a few games (running the EOS codebase, incidentally, which has permanent, comprehensive logging) where the abuse of logging was the worst-kept secret in the game and have had great fun spiking the logs with commentary meant for the person reading them. I think my favorite was quoting esoteric bits of literature via tells to myself and then running a quiz the following week containing questions liked to the material and trying to ferret out who was a log-reader. Good times.

Both of my own MUDs have options to enable logging 100% of input on a per-player basis. Good to watch problem players or capture input to help reproduce a hard to find problem. The only things never logged are hard flagged in the command table, and I think only changing your password is blocked like that.

We have options to log player input but it's not something we do routinely. I think this is a fairly standard feature and I certainly wouldn't ever log into a MUD and expect that my conversations or actions were private from the administration.

I ran the original God Wars back in the days when hosting was scarse and you took what you could get. The first host didn't allow me to run the mud during working hours. The second host came with a bunch of server administrators who viewed my mud as "theirs" on account of it running on their machine, and insisted on having implementor characters for themselves (and their friends) to play around with - suffice to say I didn't stay with them for long. The third host let me run the mud 24/7 and didn't request any in-game privilages, but they did have some strict rules.

These rules included conditions such as "no swearing", which I had to enforce on the mud or risk being kicked off the server. The host also served as a higher authority who the players could (and would) approach with complaints about me or my staff, and such complaints were taken very seriously - I was given the chance to defend myself, but the burden of proof was often placed on me.

On one occasion I came pretty close to being kicked off the server. But I was lucky (or more accurately, the mud was buggy) enough to have full logs of recent activities, and some frantic grepping pulled up a conversation from my accusor to a friend of his, boasting about how he was going to get the mud shut down in revenge for some slight made by one of my staff. I quickly learned to log disgruntled players as a sort of insurance policy.

For a while I also had an implementor position on another GodWars mud where all imms/imps were fully logged, and I believe this was for similar reasons (I think they were hosted with the same person as the original God Wars, or at least part of the same network).

I don't explicitly log people these days (either individually or as "all" - my mud doesn't even support it, or snoop for that matter), unless you count the public channel history. But it's always possible that something might get caught by the log or the debugger, so I make no promises about privacy. Likewise, I never expect privacy when playing elsewhere.

I find it offensive and unethical. Sadly it appears to be fairly typical behavior.
I've likened snooping and logging to anal rape.
There are several lengthy threads on the subject over on TMC.

Edit: http://www.mudconnect.com/discuss/discus...
Some people also got bugged because I removed log and snoop from Murk++. ;-P

Wow, blast from the past! It even has kingarthyr…poor guy.

Good times.

I think in general what got people's attention about that codebase wasn't just
that you pulled snoop from it (I mean really, so what), I think it was the big
high horse you mounted and rode around about it. :)

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

My MUD records the last 100 commands executed for debugging purposes, however certain commands get truncated for privacy. So you might see:



I don't believe it's generally appropriate to log (or more precisely, to read the logs of) what people are saying, especially over private channels. I also don't want to be debugging something, going through the trace files, and accidentally read something I wasn't supposed to see.

I think that having an option to turn on full logging for a player is good, although of course it should be used with care or to investigate claims of abuse, etc. But, I think it should be made clear to players somewhere (e.g., the rules) that this is a possibility and that truly confidential communication should be done elsewhere.

I don't think that players should expect their communication to be completely confidential, although it would be polite if the administrators generally treated it as such, and made clear when communication would no longer be confidential (e.g., in the case of abuse complaints).

Not having snoop available would certainly annoy me. I often use it as a debugging tool so I can follow players through bug reports, especially when they claim something has happened that I find rather unlikely. Log is remarkably less useful for this end, I suppose.

I would not be comfortable playing on a mud that logged everything out of some voyeuristic paranoia on the part of an admin. I once had administrative differences, we'll call them, with someone who felt it was appropriate to not only log every single line of input, but also to confront people based on things that they said on the mud to their friends while laboring under the delusion of privacy. After we parted ways, I discovered that he had also begun logging password input.

There are excellent reasons to log input, and there are bad reasons to log input. It's difficult to say that logging, as a generalization, is good or bad, but to answer the question posed in the thread's title, it becomes too much when your reasons for doing so are no longer both practical and morally defensible. (How's that for legalese?)

In some situations it might still be useful/interesting to include the length of the message, eg:



Or you could just censor out letters (eg replacing every letter with 'x'), leaving numbers and punctuation in place. You could also indicate if the message was a repeat of that user's previous message, as that suggests spamming.

Finally, how about an option allowing players to 'report' offensive tells, for muds that deal with such things through rules? Players can already do that via copy and paste, but making it an in-game option prevents scenarios where one player denies having said something.



Yeah I occasionally have players ask me to snoop them so they can show me something, and I have to explain that there's no snoop command. I can work around the issue though - sometimes they'll log themselves and post or email it to me, other times they'll describe it in enough detail that I can reproduce it (if necessary I create a clone of their character which I can log onto the test port, to try things from their perspective).


I once had dealings with a rival mud that used to advertise on mine (back in the GW1 days). Many of my players would use the same name and password, and this other mud would use their passwords to take over their characters on my mud. On one occasion they even captured the password of a mid-level imm, and caused a fair bit of grief before I was able to ban the character.