Member Discussions

For the past few weeks, I've been getting e-mail invitations every few days to join the LinkedIn network of a MUSH administrator on whose game I briefly played several years ago. From another forum, I know that others who played on and have left this game (think "Chinese-spouting cowboys in space") are also getting these invitations. It's pretty clear that this administrator is treating the player e-mail addresses the game required at registration as his personal property.

That clear violation of what would seem to be common ethics aside, I know some games request e-mail addresses at registration, some require them, and some even insist that they not be Web-based e-mail accounts. If you do, would you consider alternative ways of providing passwords to those who have lost theirs (which is the most common reason I've seen given for requiring an e-mail address), such as generating a random and unique "key" that the player would have to include in an e-mail or on-game request? What other reasons are there for collecting e-mail addresses, and what alternatives could be found to collecting them?

There's no real reason to collect email addresses for a MUD besides attempting to limit how many characters you create per logged email. Even so, why limit how many characters someone can make? If they need to tell you your password, why not do it admin to player instead of through email?

I guess I'm biased about this since I always thought collecting emails was silly and not needed. The only thing that should require an email is your forums since from the looks of it, just about every forum code is setup to require them to activate your account.

Actually, I can think of many nice things you can do with email addresses, and I've begun implementing some of them. Email registration is strictly voluntary at the moment but already we're nearing a point where most players want to register an email address in order to take advantage of certain features. Some of these can be pulled off with any kind of unique player id, but others require communication. An email kills two birds with one stone.

Some examples:

Usability features:

1. Send yourself password reminders and a full list of alts (we have no alt limit) if you forget any.

2. Browse the inventory of all your alts (find where an item is) and move items around without having to log them in/out. See your total gold or total accumulated quest points, or any other stat, across all alts.

3. If you, as a player, have been rewarded for community contributions in any way, the perks can be carried over to all of your other alts. If you own virtual real estate, your alts can be auto-added as co-owners. If you're part of a player guild/clan which requires total commitment, your new alts can also be auto-added.

4. Subscribe to alerts when certain in-game events happen or are about to happen.

5. Easily email all your macros or identified items database, or any other char-related info, to yourself. Easily transfer or apply global preferences to new alts.

6. People can email you via the game without knowing your email address. Basically, the in-game mail system can be linked up to the email system.


Security/Admin Benefits:

1. Know how many active unique players your game has at any given time.

2. Detect multiplay more easily, including people sharing characters (if your policy disallows it).

3. Track abusers hoping to cover their tracks by alt switching.

4. Reach individuals if something happens that cuts out other modes of communication (e. g. they can't login for some reason).

5. Build a mailing list of users who want to be notified of big events or even promotions. Use it sparingly to make people remember to log in and check new stuff, always with an option to unsubscribe.

I'll probably think of many more uses by the time I'm done implementing all of the above.

Pretty much anything from that list can be done without ever divulging personal information.

(Comment added by Epilogy on Mon Aug 8 15:42:53 2011)

The only two reasons I'd ever be willing to submit even my email would be:
1. to recover a password, and even then it needs to be through a system I can trust not to be abused.
2. to receive a newsletter. If I play the game often enough, there's not even a need for a newsletter, so this is fairly moot.

Aye at one point we at Xaos were pretty adamant about having a valid email address on record but not so much anymore. At this point its an utterly optional thing that they can choose 'none' instead without penalty. We tend to find it useful though once in a blue moon to consult with past staff or players about particular things but yah its not really that needed anymore for sure.

All of that information mentioned we have covered under player profiles and those in turn are where someone can opt to provide an address email as well. I suppose if we had more situations of requests for password recovery I might pay more attention to it but again with one password as the gateway to one's whole profile its just not something that comes up.

I don't think I've ever progressed through the character
creation of any mud that REQUIRED an email address. That
being said, I wouldn't have issue submitting an email to a
mud I had been enjoying for a while, if it had some sort of
benefit to me.

Huh. I'm starting to believe that those who think they can con people with a phishing e-mail may be a lot smarter than I've ever given them credit for being.

We do not require it for login etc. We DO require it if you lost your password. If it is blank or you cannot remember it, then the character idles until you remember it. If a player cannot remember a password they made up I doubt they would remember a key to retrieve it.

I'm always worried the admin will use it for spam, so I enter
a fake email or a throwaway email if they have to send me a
code.

Sorry to hear about OP's problem, I also get spam to join social networks from various sources, but.

I think some sort of email spam from a mud admin is at the very bottom of the list of my worries for giving out my email.

On the other hand the admins have several reasons for asking players to submit emails that are legitimate.

If you don't want to give an email to join a community stay offline. It's as close to a real handshake as we have in cyberspace.

I have no problem giving my email to legitimate organizations. I didn't even mind giving my email to TMC. I do have a problem giving my email to some guy/kid that happens to host some kind of MUD.

Like Jodah and others I have a few email addresses and one of them is reserved for giving to MUD admins and other potential spammers/email sellers.

I think the concerns people have raised so far about giving out an email address are side effects, with the underlying cause being that there are thousands of MUDs out there and asking for email on registration is one of those things that help you disqualify a game very early on. This helps you move on fast in your quest for the perfect game, and says nothing about the quality of the game you overlooked.

As for justifying your decision, you can always come up with reasons after the fact. I mean, are we even having a discussion about giving out an email address in 2012? The way I see it:

1. The average person gives out their email several times a day to anyone who claims they require it to transact online. This includes many persons and organizations with whom the person will only transact once in their life, for a few seconds (e. g. buy a fridge filter).

2. If you're anything like me or everyone I know, you get far, far, far more spam from "legitimate organizations" than you do from individuals. Some of these organizations will pass it on to other legitimate organizations. Organizations are much more organized about spamming your a** than individuals are.

3. Virtually every email client comes equipped with super easy-to-use spam blocking features that often prompt the user with nice big buttons. If you know how to check your email, then you know how to block a sender. A spamming individual is much easier to block than a spamming organization.

One thing to take home from this discussion is for MUD admins to consider asking for an email address a bit down the line, when the user has gotten to try out some of the actual gameplay. This removes an obstacle for some players who think giving out their email is "moving too fast" in the relationship.

For instance, in my game, an email address is never required, but there are neat features that can be unlocked by sharing one. For most of these features, the email can be totally fake. For password reminders or quest alerts, it would need to be real, of course.

I think it is common practice for people now to have multiple
email accounts for multiple things:

1) Work email
2) Family/friends email (sometimes even this is compartmentalized)
3) Commerce and srs stuff email
4) Demilitarized zone email: what you submit to sites you suspect will abuse your email

Not everyone has all 4, but I think by now people are catching
on that they need at least 2 of those 4.

I'm sorry to blame the victim here, but I do. If you're
giving the same email address to some mud you're trying
out AND to linkedin, you're doing it wrong.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

I have over a dozen e-mail accounts with intricate systems of filtering and forwarding. I, too, see no problem in giving an e-mail address to
play a MUD. I can always just give one of my junk e-mail addresses. Still, I think a MUD admin is one of the least likely sources on the
internet to abuse it. For instance, I collect e-mail addresses from my players, on a purely voluntary basis. I send them maybe 2-3 e-mails
per year.

But your botnet sends about 10000 more.

Jodah wrote:
Something idiotic about botnets

I have the following responses:
1) Your statement is vague enough to be meaningless from a technical standpoint
2) Your statement demonstrates you very likely don't understand how botnets work
3) You're grasping at straws to support your unfounded notion that MUDs requesting e-mail addresses == evil
4) You're a worthless troll - go away, grown-ups are talking here

At one point in the distant past, I attempted to collect email addresses for a mailing list. I believe I used it twice; it quickly became clear to me that it was not a very useful feature.

However, email addresses did eventually demonstrate value. We now use them for password resets. Characters with an address set can request a password reset fairly easily; those without an address set must have sufficient backing in the logs, or must find an alternative way to prove ownership. As our playerbase has grown, this has become much more difficult, and we strongly encourage people to set email addresses simply for reasons of password reset.

We do not use them for any other purpose, at all. If I were to start another mailing list, I would either make it opt-in or simply require setting another address for the list.

Email spam is one of the quickest ways to piss off players.

-dentin

Alter Aeon MUD
http://www.alteraeon.com

Email spam is one of the quickest ways
to piss off players.

Not if it's a game they enjoy. I don't know of any game that
actually "spams".

I've seen an increased trend of the option of putting "none"
in the address field when creating a character in a mud, which
I think is great.

This is a *very* interesting discussion - thanks for starting it.

We require an email address at registration. We recognize that this will put off some potential players. The trade off is that for 12 years we've been able to keep our player community free from flame wars and abusive behaviors. We require players to be responsible for their words and actions, and, that means, to not be anonymous. If some people aren't up for that, that's ok: we'll have a smaller but better player community. But that's our thing - and it might not be right for others!

It's helpful to make clear to potential players that your email newsletter is strictly opt-in, and that you don't sell or give away private information including email addresses. The BBB provides a wordy but useful template for a privacy policy: http://utah.bbb.org/sample-privacy.

Hope this turns out to be useful to you,

--Mark

Personally, we do not require an email address, it can be optionally inputted and is never verified. Since we already have an account system, we have little need for using it to verify alts (it's 2012, I can't believe people would think someone actually trying to dodge alt interaction rules would use the same email unless they were quite stupid). I mainly use it to occasionally (like, once or twice a year) round up a bunch of accounts that haven't logged on in quite a while and send them a little email reminding them that we exist, in case they forgot about us. Hardly spam. The default system also uses them for notifications of imminent character deletion if it's set up so that not logging in results in your characters being automatically purged. And we're a small enough MUD that we can verify players' authenticity for password change requests without needing elaborate proof.

Although this discussion makes me realize we have no automatic email password reset/reminder system. Perhaps I should look into implementing that.

Why do you guys draw a line between a MUD collecting an email
and a forum collecting your email. Every web site out there
you register for asks for your email. So you draw an
exception with MUDs because they use telnet:// instead of
http://

I don't really think it needs to be pointed out, but MUDs are not the same as forums.

And people often use fake emails for forums. 10minutemail comes to mind.

Why do you guys draw a line between a MUD collecting an email
and a forum collecting your email. Every web site out there
you register for asks for your email. So you draw an
exception with MUDs because they use telnet:// instead of
http://

Forums mostly require email addresses due to spam concerns. If you require
email verification before posting to a forum, you cut down on a lot of spam (of
course not all - but a lot). Most MUDs arguably don't have the same spam
concerns.

I understand that, and it's true for most forums, but I think you're missing my overall point.

99% of web site registrations require your email for some reason, purpose or form. I would wager that 99% of the people posting here give that email without much thought, or if they do, they do as was suggested and use different emails for different purposes.

So again I ask, why would you draw a line at a MUD requesting your email, aside from it's a 'relatively' new practice amongst MUDs?

Every reason I've heard here of a MUD collecting an email sounds reasonable. If they're sending out promotional emails then an unsubscribe button would definitely be required, imo, which we do ourselves about 4-5 times a year.

I don't see the harm in it, myself, but with all the MUD choices out there, if you find a MUD that forces you to use a real (verified) email, and you take exception, there's about 999 other ones you can play instead, right? Or you can play an MMORPG that's FTP, but oops, they require your email too.

Is this a debate about a serious issue, or a debate for people who like to debate?

So again I ask, why would you draw a line at a MUD requesting your email,
aside from it's a 'relatively' new practice amongst MUDs?

I'm not part of the debate. I'm not drawing the line anywhere. It doesn't bother
me when a mud asks for an email address. I'd do it myself if I were to run a mud
again. I was simply pointing out why forums require email addresses.