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Re: Looking for MOO site administrators

Pavel writes:

> I would like to collect a list of the administrators of MOO servers
> with at least 50 regular users (i.e., those who connect at least
> once or twice a month).  I am interested in both public and private
> MOOs, so long as they are of sufficient size.  If you are such a
> person, please send me a message with a very brief description of
> the size of your MOO's user community.  If you know of such a person
> who is not on this mailing list, please forward this request along
> to them.

I don't think this request will elicit a full response.  Many people,
including me, are reluctant to respond with this kind of information
without an overview of what this will be used for.  I can think of
several uses off the top of my head for such a list:

  o  A mailing list for distribution of sensitive security-related
     information, intended for first use by actual administrators.

  o  User community size information for publication in a magazine or
     journal.

  o  Justification of effort spent on MOO by pointing out to management
     what kind of impact this project has had on the Internet
     community.

  o  Design feedback on typical sites in order to drive future
     development.

  o  Internal research documents.

  o  First-order estimate of commitment in the user community to
     decide feasibility of a users group or consortium.

  o  Marketing numbers.

I think other important things to consider when you see any request
like this on the net are:

  o  Scope of dissemination.  I think it's more worth it to respond if
     I get some numbers back.  This also reduces the amount of
     duplicated effort.

  o  Detail of dissemination.  I guess I'd feel better if I knew what
     parts of this would be presented as composites.

  o  Who's making the request.  I'm a lot more inclined to help
     someone who has helped me.  (Yes, Pavel very much falls in this
     category.) 

A lot of my reaction to this is knee-jerk response to various
Internet-, MUD-, and LambdaMOO-related surveys over the last few years.
Often you see scholarly requests asking the same questions you
answered in another survey a few weeks earlier.  Because my time is
limited (and so is the community's) I've been sticking to a hard-nosed
rule: "no free information for information sinks."  I doubt this
survey triggers this rule, but as it was originally written I can't
tell.

Jay Carlson
nop@nop.com    nop@ccs.neu.edu    nop@kagoona.mitre.org

Flat text is just *never* what you want.   ---stephen p spackman
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