Zugg Software :: View topic

Beginner Joined: 16 Oct 2002 Posts: 12 Location: USA

For years now I've owned (97) and promoted z-Mud as one of the most versatile MU* interface programs available and I certainly still shall. But, as a world manager I've got one exasperating problem with it. We get quite a few young teens on our game either with a purchased, trial or older version and extremely few even figure out how to even open the preferences menu much less play with the settings. As a result, that @*%&@ default auto-reconnect in 10 seconds winds up spamming our system logs for sometimes well over 12 hours at a time. I know there's a safety in there somewhere for maximum reconnection attempts but often I see that fail for some reason and I certainly can't stop the spam unless they've foolishly allowed auto-name log in. I can't believe I'm the only one experiencing this annoyance and it seems a simple thing to request Zugg make the default in the off-state. Perhaps for newer versions?

Posted: Tue Nov 30, 2004 7:38 am

The newer versions have a limit and only try to reconnect 20 times. In fact, that was added way back in version 5.x I think. So, if someone is spamming your MUD with reconnects like that, they are likely using an old hacked version of 4.62. Honestly, if I ran a MUD and someone did that, I'd ban them.

Anyway, this has long been addressed in zMUD. zMUD has been very MUD server friendly for a long time, even though getting rid of the limit of 20 has been one of the most common requests that I get.

Beginner Joined: 16 Oct 2002 Posts: 12 Location: USA

Hacked possible, annoying obviously and I'm sure you guys have addressed it before. Would it be so tough though to just make the default not be auto-login?

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Apprentice Joined: 26 Oct 2004 Posts: 108

As an implementor/wizard, we've had the same problem. However, I've told them how to solve it. Generally our mud sends a "You've been idle for..." line right before it disconnects those who are auto-reconnecting. These people I've told to trigger on that line to #disconnect.

So far it's been easilly fixed by this and we don't have any big problems. (only those who are new to it stumble on it.)

Just give them the #tr {...} {#disconnect} line and tell them to execute it.

Posted: Wed Dec 01, 2004 1:43 am

Changing the default wouldn't solve anything. The people who are doing this "by accident" should be using the newer versions where it only tries 20 times. This shouldn't be a big deal for any MUD. And all versions of zMUD since about 1998 have had this limit.

People who are doing it on purpose using a hacked version of zMUD, or an old version, would just change the option anyway if I changed the default.

The default is set the way it is because there are lots of reasons for a network connection to get dropped, and it's important when playing a MUD to get reconnected as soon as possible. It's usually not the MUD being down that causes the disconnect...it's usually some router in between the client and server getting reset that drops a connection like this.

And as I said, this is really a MUD policy issue. Just make it really clear and obvious that people who abuse this reconnect will get banned. Then the people doing it on purpose will go away, and you'll be left with the accidental people. And for the accidental people, they should be using a newer version of zMUD. There is no reason to be using version 4.62 anymore unless you are trying to use zMUD for free. And v4.62 was *not* free, it was just easy to bypass the copy protection.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

*posted to wrong thread. Ignore this Rolling Eyes

*

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

I think there's 2 issues at hand... the auto-reconnect thing stops connecting after 20 tries *if the mud is down*. This works perfectly and will not auto-reconnect after the number of tries.

There's a second issue. If the mud is NOT down, you get the login screen. If you then idle out on the login screen you reconnect straight away, the '20 tries' counter goes back to '1'. What happens then, is you idle out again and 10 seconds later get the login screen. Repeat, rinse. This fills up the muds in-game log with 'connection from <ip address>'. This gets spammy if you have a 1-2 minute timeout on the login screen.

I'm a MUD dev and what I do is set the 'connection from xxxx' at the 'debug' log level as opposed to the 'normal' log level... meaning that it doesn't show up in your everyday life but it's trace-able in the log file if you need to trace it. I also set a 15 minute timeout on the login screen so it only spams the log once every 15 minutes.

*shrug* I think that is going to happen - no matter what the client, so add your own measures to compensate...
Do what I do, plus if you want do a dynamic ip ban eg... 'bounced 5 times, refusing connections from your IP for 15 miutes'. Or put the first connection from an IP at 'normal' level then second and subsequent connections as 'debug' level.

Personally I like my playerbase so won't start handing out ban cards for bouncing off the login screen. I can live with the log spam.

Zugg could add a second fix by not resetting the connection counter until you had physically typed something so that successful connections (while afk) don't reset that counter, but that's not going to fix all the 3.xx, 4.xx, 5.xx, 6.xx, and 7.xx versions in circulation (nor mushclient, rapscallion, kmud, tintin, etc etc) so you're still going to get the problem so you might as well add your own code around it.

Posted: Wed Dec 01, 2004 11:35 pm

Good point on the reconnect resetting itself if the MUD is up and the user is not there and the session times out. I hadn't thought about that situation and will add that to the to-do list for a future version.

But yeah, that's not going to help the majority of people using the existing versions Sad