Re: [spoon-discuss] vSET

[bd <bdonlan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Wednesday 30 July 2003 12:40 am, Daniel Lepage wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 10:46  PM, Glotmorf wrote:
> > Should Dave be a public forum?
> >
> > Is there an actual genuine need for a GM with a GM screen, to whom
> > notes can be passed for actions to be taken that may well have
> > publicly visible consequences but not necessarily publicly visible
> > causes?  Do we anticipate any sort of large-scale need for hidden
> > actions?
>
> The ugly thing about hidden actions is that they often have costs. One
> of the problems with, say, Force Absorption (pay some amount of Force
> *in a note to the admin*, and the next anti-you Force move gets
> countered) was that either the Force Minister wasn't told, and we'd
> just have to trust that after spending all eir force on Absorption, a
> player wouldn't then try to use Destruction with the Force we didn't
> know e'd lost; or to tell whoever ran the records (which would have to
> be Dave if it worked like this), and have Dave note that e's absorbent
> and also surreptitiously alter the Force records to show the decrease
> in Force, and hope that nobody noticed the change.
>
> So a lot of hidden action things are too much of a hassle to be worth
> putting in the game at all.
>
> On the other hand, things like private voting (and here I'm really
> thinking about Bidding for Super Powers) could profit greatly from,
> say, a little mailing program that gathers messages sent to it, then
> releases them all when somebody sends the right one. So, for example,
> we'd all submit msgs with some tag on the top, perhaps something like
>
> {Secret Class="SuperPower_GnashyClaws Text = "I, Wonko, bid 30 points
> on the Big Gnashy Claws."}
>
> Then, when the auction ended, the Guardian would send it a msg with
> something like
>
> {Release Class="SuperPower_GnashyClaws"}
>
> and it would mail to s-b a list of all the 'Text' fields it recieved.
>
> Something like that could also be used to make a trustworthy and
> easy-to-use random number generator; send it {Random Choice('Rain',
> 'Hail', 'Gnomes', 'Sulphur')} and it s-b's one of those at random.
>
> I could even write the program to process such things pretty easily.
>
> However, I have absolutely no knowledge about the 'mail' portion of it,
> i.e., setting it up to call a program on the text of each incoming
> message (I do know how to make python send mail back); perhaps what
> I've just described is easily done by someone with the requisite
> knowledge, or perhaps it would require much more work than I'd expect.
>
> Anyone know anything about it?

There's a python module - rfc822. That can be called on stdin to get the body 
out. Run the program with .forward.

> > Personally I think the only practical way to do hidden actions is a
> > separate email address with a procmail handler, or a webform, that
> > updates a database that Dave, in a DOFOE situation, has access to.  Is
> > there interest at this time in a general-purpose database-logged
> > hidden-action submission webform?
>
> Uh... that sounds like it might be what I said, but with a side of
> technical knowledge. What's a 'procmail handler'?

Procmail is a mail filter traditionally used on unix systems. Given rules to 
match against some input, it performs some action on it, like 'discard 
message', or 'run this program with the message as input'.

- -- 
bd
The steady state of disks is full.
		-- Ken Thompson
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE/J/jHx533NjVSos4RAix7AJ0fUGinnncsJROBfp99C4yB4eX/DACgp5iO
SIMr/Rz8t8wv9tw3+plcas0=
=pjfJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

_______________________________________________
spoon-discuss mailing list
spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss