That's a standard feature in most graphical MMOs with chat I believe. They usually have some kind of "report abuse" command that captures the last X chat messages and notifies an administrator. I think it's definitely a good idea for MUDs that want to police that kind of thing.


This is one circumstance where logging of staff commands can be useful.

I agree in part. I think, though, if it's understood that communication is logged within the game and may be reviewed with cause it's fine. Well, it's fine, to me, as long as it's not fished through but rather only consulted in the case of a dispute. In most games trust-trading is protected. It's a vital tool to be able to uncover the truth if a trust-trade is violated.

Yes, this was something on my todo list; we had one too many cases of accusations where it came down to who was telling the truth regarding what was said.


Actually, yes, all commands that did anything potentially dangerous were logged completely, and to a log channel that people could see, so everybody was aware of this. You couldn't see commands from people above your rank, but people saw their own log entries so knew that builder commands were logged.


I agree, although unfortunately this comes down to trust between the players and the imms.


Is this something where we agree to trade something and are therefore held to some kind of honor code to do so, and not doing so is against the game's OOC rules?

The issue isn't how much to log, it's whom to trust with accessing the logs.

IMHO, log everything, always, unless it has an impact on your server's performance. If you log to a SQL database, you can add a field for the type of thing being logged and write views to show various types of data. You can then limit which views are accessible by which staff members.

If you use files, the same fields can be grepped for, and again you can enforce security by either splitting it into separate files, or making staff use scripts to access them.

In any case, rotating the logs (or log tables) should be done often enough to keep your disk clean. Don't throw them away, just compress them and save them somewhere.

If a complaint comes up (from whatever source), the correct log data can be pulled up to discover the circumstances and verify or deny the claim. If you don't do that, you put yourself in the position of having to "snoop" people and hope to catch them doing something after the fact. Snooping is worse than logging, because you know that a human is actively being a voyeur. Your admin could still do that with logs, but at least they aren't forced to.

After reading what everyone else thinks, I think my biggest issue with the way I discovered this wasn't the fact that everything was logged, it was the fact that no one ever knew every little thing was constantly logged, and looking back, some of the things that the Imms there seemed to know seemed odd at the time, and now looking at the logging in place, it's no wonder they would know things like they did.

I've got no problems with logging everything as long as people are upfront about what is and isn't logged. When I find out years after playing that everything I ever said or did could be on some strangers computer without my knowledge, I kindof take offense to that. With regards to dispute settling and the like, I can understand this type of logging, as well as for trying to find a bug or the like, which is the only time I'd every actively turn on the comprehensive logging in my games.

Smaug also sports this nice little command called Watch which allows you to log everything input from a single player. And there's times where that's necessary because of a distrust, or a feeling of …I'm not really sure how to describe it. When multiple staff members are worried that a player might be doing something skeptical but not necessarily outlined in the rules. Or even worse, trying to take advantage of an underaged player. Etc. If that makes sense.

For example, in many places they protect deals made in regards to trade skills, etc. Usually things that involve trading goods and resources on a temporary basis. For example, you tell me you'll enchant my cloak for 5 coins. I give you the materials required + the 5 coins. You take my materials (presumably valuable) and the 5 coins and log off.

In the circles I've been in we've called it trust-trades. Typically the rules allowed for these such situations to be reversed. When it was malicious and the accused denied any existence of an agreement we'd review communication logs between the two individuals.

Dunno exactly what you mean here, but quite a few years ago I had an issue where police got involved. Apparently an underaged player and an older man met via the MUD and there were allegations by the child's parents. I don't know if they were true but there was an investigation and interestingly they requesting any logs we may have.

Something very similar indeed. Except no police involved.

I think if you log everything, aka clear-cut logging, it's too much and you need to replant or suffer deforestation of your game ;p.

And yeah, I'm being a smart ascii.

Emud supports this. Each player has a 50KB scrollback buffer which is used for grepping, with an option to dump the entire buffer to file.

For debugging Emud keeps an internal stack that's dumped on a crash, I personally don't see the need to log anything.

That's a good idea.



Well, suppose that you've noticed that you have complaints about odd errors at odd
times, and they seem to coincide with logins from, say, Singapore, while you're at work
or sleeping. Not all problems reported by a player are caused by that player, and
while the self-initiated logdump is a good idea, it doesn't cover all possible reasons
one might want to set up a log of a player or ip range.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Besides, if you're getting a crash, it's quite possible that whatever's causing the crash is also borking up the internal stack. And indeed, not all problems you'd want to consult logs for are in fact related to debugging crashes.

My personal take on this is:

1) Log absolutely everything.
2) Store the logs in encrypted form, and ensure that only the head admin has access to them, not rank-and-file immortals.
3) Make this policy highly public.

One obvious need for logging (as has been articulated more than once) is when you investigate an allegation of abuse. For example, suppose you discover something that is very obviously a bug, and you want to know which (if any) players have been abusing it for personal gain - there's no easy way to determine that if you don't have access to historical logs. You may be able to catch them doing it now - but there's no way to prove how many times they've done it in the past, and how much they have gained by doing so. Much the same applies in cases where there is an accusation of antisocial OOC behaviour (e.g. a player is accused of extreme OOC racism or of advocating OOC criminal behaviour) - in order to be able to take the correct decision you need to have objective evidence of who actually did or said what. Similarly, if a player claims to have suffered a loss because of a bug, the log provides evidence that he is being truthful (or not) so you can set an appropriate level of compensation.

I wouldn't be comfortable on a MUD where any immortal had access to the logs, and I would be annoyed if I found out that the admin had been reading the logs for purely voyeuristic reasons; if that happens, it's a good reason to leave the MUD and go elsewhere; but the possibility of that happening is not (IMO) a good enough reason not to have logs at all.

I would compare this to a situation where an admin routinely handed out level boosts to the characters controlled by his RL friends. Clearly this is not acceptable behaviour; but in this case preventing the possibility of it happening (by not permitting even the admin any kind of access to character-state files, thus rendering him unable to reverse the effects of bugs or bug exploits) is too high a price to pay.