[dentin]

There have been a loot of very good threads on this topic here and in the mud connector forums; I'd recommend you look for those in the archives as well as any comments you may get here.

I personally take opinions and ideas, but most of the time I blackhole them because they're either duplicate, irrelevant, a bad idea, or not worth the time implementing. Things usually get mudmailed directly to me, but sometimes things also appear on the public 'god interface board' for general discussion.

I recommend you have a typo command that logs the typo in the room the character is in, and also an 'idea' command that logs ideas to a file for later examination. Both of these serve to eliminate a lot of direct comments.

For spammers and newbie annoyance characters, you'll want siteban ability and comprehensive communication send suppression to limit the damage before an admin can be notified. There are a number of other tools that can help with this.
For persistent illegal pk and "you should have known better" bug abuse, I strongly recommend a timered freeze system. For pk, my motto is to freeze early, freeze often, but don't permanently freeze. Making sure the character thaws in a reasonable amount of time encourages problem players to focus on that character and invest more heavily, because even if they pk someone they'll get the character back eventually. A heavily invested player is less likely to do anything dumb. In short, lower the penalty duration, decrease the crime.

For people who are are hatemongers or sex motivated, warn or ban.

For bug finding and abuse, I only punish for blatant repeated abuse of a non-reported bug. If as a player, you 1) find the bug, 2) use the bug a few times to verify it, and 3) personally tell the me and make sure I about it, then you're basically golden and will get brownie points from me. However, it -is- allowed to continue to use the bug after #3, as long as the bug is considered trivial or not worth fixing. Many players do this safely, or to ensure that I fix something they know is a problem.

What's not ok is to do things like buy a billion gold coins because of a compound interest bug at a shopkeeper. For things of that ilk, I usually repossess all material goods plus a hefty percentage penalty, or freeze. If it's persistent and too much work to deal with, I'll siteban, but that's extremely rare.

The biggest issue I've run into recently is dealing with people who are just generally jerks, and the drama queens that feed them.

-dentin

Alter Aeon MUD