I've never played your mud and don't know your rules, but you've mentioned in your post that it is a rule that you cannot attack newbies, as measured by a play time of less than 5 hours.  Now wouldn't you spend a great deal less time enforcing these kinds of rules if the game enforced them automatically?  There may be similar rules that can be hard coded which nicely sidesteps the issue over quibbling over manual enforcement.