Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2006 6:52 am

Zugg,

Will you be considering Tip of the Day feature for CMUD? I know this will require pre-writing all of them but I think it will be a useful feature. zMud (and I'm sure CMUD will be) is so feature rich than even experienced users don't know of all the features.

Case in point: I learned from Carabas today about the Expression option on TRIGGERs and from playing around on the SampleMud in zMud I came across the spam protection feature under preferences. And I'm a fairly regularly visitor to both the forums and the help files.

I think this or similar idea will be great for promoting how much zMud really can do. You could do in the product, but I think it's a good idea to have it on the website too.. as a sort of promotion of CMUD features (although I guess it's something you'd do after CMUD comes out of Beta or that Chiara would handle.)

Just a thought.

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2006 7:38 pm

I did this once for zMUD and it didn't work out very well. The problem, as you mentioned, is the lack of tips. If people started writing some tips, then I might include something like this. Any ideas would be helpful. For me it's a matter of available time...between writing the code and then getting time for the help files, tips end up being a low priority.

Also, it's important to make sure that tips are not MUD dependant.

Posted: Sat Mar 18, 2006 8:22 am

Hmmm... perhaps it would be better then for us to submit our various tips... or something the wizards, magicians, adepts etc can assist with.

Posted: Sat Mar 18, 2006 12:34 pm

You know you've got a package library, how about a tip library which can go through the same sort of peer review and you can pull out a random tip from the library at startup but only ones that match 4 stars and above.

Posted: Sat Mar 18, 2006 6:56 pm

I don't want CMUD contacting the server for anything like that when you run it. That's also why there isn't any Auto-Update feature in the new package library. We can't handle the bandwidth requirements of that. It's bad enough checking for a new version of zMUD (which just sends a single version text string back to zMUD) when you start up.

We currently get about 130,000 hits PER DAY from zMUD starting up and checking for a new version. So we have to be really careful about what we do like this. Checking a tips database and retreiving a tip that most people are not going to read anyway is probably not a good idea.

What's more likely is to have some sort of tip topic that is part of the help system. The help system works like the package library (or like the docviewer zApp documentation program). It stores the help files locally, but has an Update feature to retrieve the latest updates to the help files online. So the online help and the local help share the same data. If we had a special "tip" topic in the help file, it could get updated whenever you select the Get Updates from the help system, and the tip window could randomly display a tip from this topic.

This method would still allow us to control what tips are displayed, since only the Gurus have edit access to the help files on the server. But there wouldn't be any way to "rate" the tips or anything fancy like that.