Anonymous mail

[Dice]

Hearing about the removal of anonymous mail from the game has left me very concerned and surprised.

Sending letters that can't be easily traced to a specific person is a huge part of TI. It shouldn't necessarily take forgery skill - being able to trace a letter to somebody probably ought to be difficult and require work, rather than being the norm.

Covert folks rely extensively on being able to send anonymous mail; a lot of important things are going to become essentially not possible.

I'm also just generally confused by the post explaining why it's happening - if the problem is not being able to tell who the letter was sent to, couldn't the recipient be on the letter but not the sender?

[Jules]

I, too, am confused about the statement "some problems that covert GLs are having around the ability to tell who a message was sent to for them to respond in context."

I'm not against requiring forgery to make a letter untraceable, but I don't understand the reasoning behind the disabling of anonymous mail in the meantime, especially when covert characters rely so heavily on this system. How long will we be without the ability to write anonymous mail? Is the forgery system going to be implemented soon?

Aside from messengers, the only other means of sending an anonymous message would be to stick a piece of paper in an envelope. However, last I checked, it was possible to retool packages and view the @to and @from information, and I worry that people will use OOC means to discover IC information.

[Leech]

Covert GLs have trouble discerning whether the mail was sent to, say 'Tenebrae' or to their common name, 'Joe'. That's the initial problem.

[Leech]

I think it might be beneficial to look at how mail was handled in medieval times, whether or not 'to and froms' were written on the front and required by courier offices, and then find out what the exceptions are: people with a high forgery skill, covert GLs who (assumedly) have connections, and then people who bribe couriers(?).

Too often we just assume that the courier is a tool, and not a place with vNPC people running. Also, grab yourselves a copy of the forgery spec if you haven't already! As said before, this is a temporary (though I wouldn't, and still don't want, 'from' to be apparent) fix to a very large problem that's plagued coverts forever, and will be replaced by forgery. Thae problem being that Joe can write a letter to Bob, saying 'Dear Tenebrae', and if Bob replies to it as the Tenebrae...

Well, Bob is probably the Tenebrae. It's a cheap way to fool somebody into revealing one of the biggest secrets of their life.

[Jules]

The thought of taking advantage of the anonymous mail system to do something that sneaky had honestly never occurred to me, Leech. Thanks for laying that out so clearly.

But this does seem like something that could easily be fixed by including the "sent to" field rather than the recipient in the meantime, as Dice noted.

[Kinaed]

The solution overlooked a problem, so we didn't add the From back in at this time.

I'm not sure if we will when forgery comes in, but forgery and mail headers/aliases, etc are the Next Big Thing on the docket. I just finished reviewing the spec and confirmed it for programming.

[Applesauce]

I agree that the "To" alone solves the original problem, but once forgery goes in there's not really a purpose for it without "From" so it makes sense to have that too.

Maybe this is something meant for its own thread, but how will mail aliases and character names handle future conflicts? For example:

1) Jim registers a mail alias for "Steve". Write to Steve for all your secret needs.
2) A player (whether or not they know Steve is a registered mail alias) makes an actual character named Steve.
3) ???
4) Who profits, Jim or the new Steve?

I think it would be too restrictive to disallow character names because they are existing mail aliases, but on the other hand that new char is not announced to all offline people, so they may end up sending letters to the wrong person without any indication that's what's happening.

[Inertia]

I didn't closely read the spec (or if I did I've forgotten it already...ahem), but I distinctly recall a mention about registering aliases. So I've been operating under the assumption that you're basically setting up a second code name (like Librarian, Rubeus, Tenebrae) so anything too close to it would be barred. Say Ariel wants to register Camille as his alias, he wouldn't be able to if there was already a Camilla character or alternatively, Camilla couldn't create because Camille was already registered as an alias, since names can't share the first four letters with any other name.

[Dice]

Ariel would NEVER register Camille, c'mon. That's his shame.

I think that method makes sense, assuming it takes some real cost to register an alias (and you can't register tons).

Also, for forgery, we could always have a 'mail anonymous' option where the from is anonymous. What you need forgery for is when you're trying to pretend it's actually from someone else; I would really hate for forgery to be needed just to be anonymous.

[Applesauce]

I didn't closely read the spec (or if I did I've forgotten it already...ahem), but I distinctly recall a mention about registering aliases. So I've been operating under the assumption that you're basically setting up a second code name (like Librarian, Rubeus, Tenebrae) so anything too close to it would be barred. Say Ariel wants to register Camille as his alias, he wouldn't be able to if there was already a Camilla character or alternatively, Camilla couldn't create because Camille was already registered as an alias, since names can't share the first four letters with any other name.

Yes, that's exactly my concern. My "step 1" above was registering an alias.

IMO some of the recent names are already pretty iffy, I would hate to think what happens after existing players get to register "all the good names".

At the moment I can't think of any way it could work other than, like you said, blocking names in both directions. It's just an uncomfortably huge amount of name beginnings, IMO.