So you’ve got a good start on a MUDLib, either by modifying the Kernel MUDLib directly or with the help of Shevek’s BBLib. You’re rip-roaring to go and you’ve even been adding a few little extra features here and there. Great! Welcome to the ever-expanding community of DGD MUDLib authors. We’re happy to hear from you on the mailing list, we’re happy you’re out there, and we look forward to your contributions to the set of MUDLibs we can study and use!
What can we do to help you? Well, for starters we can suggest some things you should do to keep your MUDLib usable, featureful and secure – and believe me, doing all that at once is hard! The Adding Stuff to your MUDLib section on the previous page is here to help you figure out some things you should put in your MUDLib. It can’t tell you everything. The things that make your MUDLib different and special are the things we’d never think of because only you have the vision to make them happen. But we can help you fix some common problems and avoid some common pitfalls.</p>
In this series of documents we’ll try to talk about security pretty regularly. We tend to assume that you’re going to have some not-really-trusted people running code. That may be your users but more often it’ll be admins or builders you’ve given access to so they can build areas. They may or may not be fully trustworthy but even the best programmer can have a bad day now and again. When that happens it’s best if your MUDLib is robust enough to handle it. It can make sure that the worst they get is a nasty error message on their command line while the MUD chugs along with nary a hitch for the other users. It’s not really possible to make that happen all the time, especially with your highest-level admins, but we can keep you from tripping over the wrong thing quite a lot of the time if you’re willing to code carefully. DGD is just that cool.
That also means that if you’re only going to give coding rights to people you absolutely trust and who would be allowed to bring your entire MUD crashing down around your ears and destroying all your data if they felt like it… Well, then you can ignore pretty much all our security advisories. Your MUDLib won’t be the first to do so.