Mamnuts

Mamnuts and PyTalker are dead, long live TZMud!

2010-10-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

This is a cross-posting on my own blog, since PyTalker's website is down for a long time, and on Mamnuts' website.

If you don't know what a talker is, this is a blog post that you probably don't want to read. If you do, please check that link, which points to wikipedia. Once upon a time, there were plenty of talker codebases - which, like "web servers", were used to "serve" a talker (or a website, in the case of web servers). Most of the talker codebases are nowadays unmaintained, even if there are quite lots of talkers. But the bad part of that is that there's still interest - I find myself talking with new people several times a year regarding the fact that they're looking for a talker codebase. There are many problems associated with choosing a talker base nowadays: the biggest being that the only that was still maintained - until now - was Mamnuts. I say "maintained", but the only thing that I've been doing on it for the last couple of years is actually giving some support to its users, and I'm surely dissatisfied with its state. In particular, Mamnuts is insecure. PyTalker, which used to be my pet project of building a talker base from scratch is pretty much abandoned, and never really got into a state where I could happily recommend it as a viable alternative to Mamnuts. What about the unmaintained codebases? Well, don't get me even started with those: there's not a single one that isn't buggy, flawed and - the worst of all - insecure. Really: if you're looking at NUTS 3.3.3 or AmNUTS, even the CVS branch, don't. Sucks, heh? Well, not any more.

I had several choices, really. I could choose to undertake the huge task of fixing Mamnuts (actually throwing away most of the underlying NUTS-inherited code), but it was simply too much work. Or I could take PyTalker by the horns and just make its idea work - which had an estimated amount of man-hours quite inferior to the first option. But... what about maintaining and expanding it afterwords? One of the issues with PyTalker would be that, as soon as a working version was released, I would have to work on implementing each feature Mamnuts had, to be able to have a convincing argument against the usage of Mamnuts, leaving to the side the only unarguable preference: the common "but I prefer C to Python!" (and, really, there's lots of people saying that in the talkers world, imagine that!). I hoped to find a good team to do the job with me, but others would find even less time than me to dedicate to the job. It wouldn't work. Sigh. Well, I would have to do it by myself... with the use of nice Python frameworks. And, while looking at those and who contributed to what, I just saw that there was a third, quite more interesting option: get back to the origins - now without configurability limitations - and assume once and for all that a talker is a kind of MUD with certain particularities. And so, the best way to deal with my issue was, really, find out the best configurable, well-maintained, clean, active, secure, with a nice community MUD codebase, and try to just add the configurable options needed to turn a MUD codebase into a "MUD/Talker codebase", or, in fact, a MUD with a configuration option that would let you set it up to behave like your typical talker, with just something like

allow_utf8 = True
speechmode_default = True
talkmode = True

Now, guess what... that's exactly what you need to do to turn the MUD codebase "TZMud" into a talker. That's right: TZMud is a server to host a multi-user domain (MUD) in the tradition of LPMud, but implemented in the Python programming language, and, since it's 0.9 version, with a configurable option to turn it into a NUTS-like talker.

This is also, obviously, the time to say goodbye to PyTalker and Mamnuts. Don't be sad: you'll be probably able to find me lurking on the TZMud project. And, most importantly, if you're planning on running a talker (or running one already), switch to TZMud. It lacks lot's of features, that's for sure, but that is easily fixed: just open a ticket asking for what you're missing. Feel free to contribute with code, if you can, the project maintainers are quite open and happy to review/accept your code.

This is the last blog post on Mamnuts' website.

Where to see Mamnuts in action?

2009-10-13T01:31:00.001-07:00

People sometimes ask me where can they see a Mamnuts talker in action, so here are a couple of examples:

For Portuguese speakers - telnet selva.grogue.org 8888
For English speakers - telnet typotown.net 6666

Enjoy!

Mamnuts 1.8.8 released

2007-02-08T08:04:00.000-08:00

I messed it up, Mamnuts 1.8.7 wouldn't even compile, because I forgot to clean the code up... :-( So, 1.8.8 is basicly what 1.8.7 should be.

Download here 1.8.8.

To Moe

2007-01-30T07:46:00.000-08:00

The talkers history started long ago, and one of the names that should be written in it is that of Moe's. Mike Irving, known as "Moe" by the talker community, and the creator of Moenuts, passed away on January 23rd, with suffered a massive stroke. Although he received ICU treatment at the hospital, he remained comatose and in a non-reponsive state. Unfortunately the damage was irreversible.

Here I want to give my real "thank you" to him.
Moe, you won't be forgoten.

Mamnuts 1.8.7 is out!

2007-01-22T04:46:00.000-08:00

Mamnuts 1.8.7 is out:

Fixed a bug that exists in any version of Amnuts 2.3.0 or Mamnuts. Strings ending with ~ or ^ had as its output ~RS. That doesn't happen anymore.

Get it!

Mamnuts 1.8.6 is out!

2006-12-04T03:42:00.000-08:00

Mamnuts 1.8.6 is out! This version fixes a bug that was introduced in the 2.3.0 branch of Amnuts, and that let's anyone crash any talker, so upgrading is highly recommended.

Download it here!

Mamnuts 1.8.5 is out!

2006-11-29T11:12:00.000-08:00

Mamnuts 1.8.5 is out! This version fixes a bug on .smail that was introduced in the 2.3.0 branch of Amnuts.

Download it here!

Mamnuts 1.8.4 is out

2006-10-31T08:45:00.000-08:00

Mamnuts 1.8.4 is out. Upgrade is recommended. Some things were changed, including a bug fix that makes mamnuts run well on Solaris (this bug was present in any version of (m)amnuts), but I had to take .set room because of it. Then, I found a stupid bug introduced by me because of lack of attention and propper testing on .sto: sorry about that :-( That's now fixed in this release.

Grab it!

Mamnuts CVS

2006-10-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

Finally, Mamnuts is in a public CVS repository!

Mamnuts 1.8.3

2006-07-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

WARNING:

A SECURITY BUG was found in Amnuts and Mamnuts. That bug exists in EVERY version of Amnuts and Mamnuts (before 1.8.3). So, if you don't want your talker compromised and the account where it is running, upgrade to Mamnuts 1.8.3.

New developer

2006-07-14T03:47:00.000-07:00

Pix was now added as a Mamnuts developer. Thanks for your help!

Mamnuts on BerliOS

2006-07-12T11:59:00.000-07:00

I've registred Mamnuts in BerliOS. The center of development is still this blog, but I registred the project there because from now one releases will be made there...

Mamnuts 1.8.2

2006-07-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

As you can see in the latteral bar, Mamnuts 1.8.2 is out. This version only adds the .sto command, so if you don't want it you can ignore this release and not upgrade. Notice that I have now the tarballs in two different places (one of them as a mirror) so it gets harder to have downtime problems...

Mamnuts v1.8.1 released

2006-07-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

Mamnuts v1.8.1 has been released today. This release fixes lot's of bugs and almost implements .visual. That implementation is just commented, because the actual code has some incorrectnesses that make have interoperability issues: it will work well (I suppose) in Linux, but I can't promiss nothing, specialy in other Operating Systems. So, I just decided to have it there in comments (that you can easily take off if you want to try it), and leave the cleanup of that code for a further version.

As allways, upgrade is recommended, since there are those bugfixes there.

The project is gaining a bigger dimension than the one I was expecting, and we actualy have contributions: NomadWolf contributed in the past and now Pix contributed (with the visual code). Keeping track of TODO stuff is also starting to get a mess, so I'm planing to have a proper project development website, instead of just a blog. File storage is one of the things needed: if you notice, this version isn't hosted where the other are, because the former server has availability problems. Problem is, this one also have them. So, what I really need is a proper project management system to keep Mamnuts development. In time, I'll be back to that...

TODO

2006-06-05T07:08:00.000-07:00

Since the internacionalization support is still quite "alpha" in Mamnuts, the translated files (for now, only in Portuguese) shouldn't have accentuated characters.

Mamnuts 1.8.0 is out!

2006-05-30T08:01:00.000-07:00

Some hours ago I wrote this:

It's allways fun to read to other talker's codes: not other code bases, but, knowing a particular codebase, knowing which changes were made in more than ten years of existence of a talker. Of course that, for each code change, a design flaw is being found: talker bases shouldn't be made to be hacked around but to allow enough customization to avoid it. Yesterday night I spent lot's of time reading a quite old talkers code, and there was really some funny stuff there... And lot's of ideas of stuff to implement in Mamnuts. But everything in time... Another thing I am playing with is with trying to compile sanely Mamnuts on Solaris 9, with GNU Make and GNU gcc. I just had to change the Makefile to gcc instead of cc, and follow the comments to uncomment two Solaris lines and commenting the two others. Easy and documented well enough, even if I think we should use automake and autoconf in the future... And, voilá, it compiles, even if spitting lot's of Warnings (I'll have to fix that...). Since the whole thing is being compiled using -Wall, the number of Warnings wasn't that scary, so I tried to compile it without -Wall, to see if there were any really important Warnings to take care of. As expected, no Warnings. So, let's see what we can do to fix those others... For now, I just can bet that I'll use this as an excuse to purge MANDNS from Mamnuts... This code, despite having better performance in BSD systems, isn't that well written (as we can see with the use of isspace()), and uses popen, which is a blocking call.

And now, before posting it, I just have a further addo: Mamnuts 1.8.0 is out!

Mamnuts 1.7 released

2006-05-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

Mamnuts 1.7 has been released, and can be downloaded here.

Changelog:
v1.7:
Fixed a bug on user descriptions.

Roadmap:

--- Concept:

Following the directions that can be read at http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com/2005/11/building-talker.html , the idea os MAMNUTS is to provide a secure an stable code base until AmNUTS 2.3.0 is done.

--- Towards full security and stability:

v1.8.0:
Remove smail related code: .smail .rmail and such commands AND everything that sends or uses it's code.

v1.8.1:
Implement a SpamGuard system. Better yet, if time lets me do it, implement something like Uzume suggests here.

v1.9.0:
Fix #36: Revert "multi-line paste" changes. It will reduce usability but fix a security issue.

v2.0.0:
Fix the charset issues with non-ASCII chr()'s. This mean implementing a proper telnet support, or, at least, filter those characters aund bind thrm to static printouts.
This will be (hopefully) a bug-free talker base.

--- Improoving functionality:

v2.1.0:
The 'AFK' function (including command, calls, presentation et all) should be renamed 'BUSY'.

v2.2.0:
Implementation of an SSLPORT, similar to WIZPORT but that provides the possibility of telnet-ssl connections.

v2.3.0:
Modularize all ports, to MAINPORT (to be renamed to TELPORT), WIZPORT (renamed to TWIZPORT) and SSLPORT can be included or not. That will give more configurability (for instance, set up a talker that only allows telnet-ssl connections).

v2.4.0:
Major clean-up of the code and documentation effort.

v2.5.0:
Re-implement a messaging system to replace the 'smail' functions. Implement it to mails, news, suggestions and virtualy everything that uses the actual EDITOR calls.

Mamnuts 1.6

2006-03-27T11:12:00.000-08:00

Mamnuts 1.6 has been released, and can be downloaded here.

The Changelog:

Now there are helpfiles in English or Portuguese. The default is English, but you just have to change the config file to point out to the Portuguese support. Thanks to NomadWolf for helping with the translation. If you know any other language and want to contribute with translations, we'll gladly accept your help and include them!
user->recap now resets the terminal colours. That will make an usefull use of user->recap and user->bw_recap in a way that you'll never need to escape colours to do whatever you want.
.read shows user->recap instead of user->bw_recap .

To Do:

v1.7: Remove smail related code: .smail .rmail and such commands AND everything that sends or uses it's code.
v1.8: Implement a SpamGuard system. Better yet, if time lets me do it, implement something like Uzume suggests in here.
v1.9: Fix #36: Revert "multi-line paste" changes. It will reduce usability but fix a security issue.
v2.0: Fix the charset issues with non-ASCII chr()'s. This mean implementing a proper telnet support, or, at least, filter those characters aund bind thrm to static printouts.

TODO

2006-03-21T11:47:00.000-08:00

I should get rid of all the mail system on Mamnuts (to 2.0 version) and design an alternative (to 2.1). The actual system is utterly broke. The problem is that this is not some easy task: removing the mail commands won't suffice, events that trigger mails (like promoting an offline user) must be also checked.

[EDIT:]

For 2.0 also, a Spamguard should be done.

Mamnuts 1.5

2006-03-03T11:44:00.000-08:00

Mamnuts 1.5 has been released, here's the Changelog:

Spodlist was utterly broken for some compilers, so it was removed.
Description length is now variable with the maximum name length.
Grep user was somewhat broken in the presentation layer, so it was removed.
The clear screen function now does the right thing and sends the clear screen escape character. Since not every "telnet client" supports it (shame on them!) the character is still preceeded by a flood of new lines (more, this time), so nobody looses .cls functionality.

Next version will hopefuly be 2.0.

Mamnuts 1.4

2006-03-03T08:38:00.000-08:00

Mamnuts 1.4 has been released, fixing a Netlinks bug.

Next version will hopefuly be 2.0.

TODO

2006-02-16T14:30:00.000-08:00

Note to self: this bug must be fixed.

Mamnuts 1.3 is out

2005-12-07T11:48:00.000-08:00

Mamnuts 1.3 is out.

The next release will be 2.0, fixing multi-line issues.

Bug

2005-12-05T12:20:00.000-08:00

I've just realised that .set wrapper could induce users to see faked messages, just as .echo used to in the old NUTS 2 days. So this is what I could consider a bug, by design, since it is a problem of using telnet as the interface. Since that kind of design is not to be changed with Mamnuts (there are other projects for that purpose), the think to do is to get rid of .set wrapper. Will be on next release's TODO list.

Mamnuts 1.2 is out!

2005-12-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

Mamnuts 1.2 is out!

As allways, you can download it clicking on the left sidebar.

Mamnuts 1.1 is out!

2005-11-24T12:53:00.000-08:00

I told you that the aim of this project was to achieve as fast as I could to version 2.0: a bugless fully-featured talker base. So, it's with great pleasure that I announce Mamnuts 1.1, that you can download clicking on the sidebar.

This version corrects minor issues and removes the seamless reboot code.

Mamnuts 1.0 is out!

2005-11-23T14:11:00.000-08:00

Mamnuts 1.0 is out. Check the left bar where you can download it.

Roadmap

2005-11-23T13:49:00.000-08:00

Here's the Roadmap for Mamnuts as it is defined at the moment:

Following the directions that can be read at
http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com/2005/11/building-talker.html, the idea os
MAMNUTS is to provide a secure an stable code base until AmNUTS 2.3.0 isn't
done. Here's the roadmap:

v1.0:
Release MAMNUTS as AmNUTS CVS is right now, but with the changes to show that
this is MAMNUTS and not AmNUTS.
This won't be a bug-free version, but will be the most bugless talker base
there is...

v1.1:
Fix #3: The easy fix is to take out the .sreboot command.

v1.2:
Fix #11: The easy fix is to take out the .kill command.

v1.3:
Fix #23: The easy fix is to take out .xcom and .gcom commands.

v1.4:
Fix #36: Revert "multi-line paste" changes. It will reduce usability but fix a security issue.

v2.0:
Fix #44: Changing "int" to "socklen_t" will probably fix the issue, but you'll
have to live with the fact that it won't work in old systems.
This will be (hopefully) a bug-free talker base.

If you have ideas for what should be included in this roadmap, please e-mail me
about it to marado@isp.novis.pt.

Mamnuts project created

2005-11-23T13:46:00.000-08:00

After I've wrote about what's the best to do to build a talker, where I say that unfortunately there's no out-of-the-box bug-free talker base, I noticed that I had to do something so people doesn't have to wait for AmNUTS 2.3.0 to be release. So, I've created Mamnuts, which intends to be a quick-releasing projecto to give you a bug free based talker. Soon I'll post here the roadmap.