Proposal: Ad Exchanges
This is a proposal sparked by a guest logging onto my game yesterday to propose an ad exchange. It made me think about this practice, which seems to have fallen by the wayside more and more over the years. Instead, it has been replaced by advertising on various community sites, either in the form of MUSHes or on the web.
This is all well and good, but in many cases those community sites would seem to be frequented primarily by other advertisers, who presumably are more likely to be staff as well as players rather than just players. That probably means they are also less likely to have the time and/or interest to join another game.
That's where my proposal comes in.
I am suggesting using c.p.o to facilitate ad exchanges. The process as I am currently imagining it would involve the following steps.
1) Those wishing to exchange ads post them to their blogs on c.p.o, tagging them with an "Ad" tag. Javelin has created this tag, and will be setting up a page or block for showing recent ads. This would, I believe, allow all ads to be browsed.
2) When someone wishes to initiate an ad exchange, they would pick an ad from the existing ones and post it to their game. They would then leave a comment on the blog posting containing the ad they posted, saying that they have posted it to their game and could the poster of the ad in question please reciprocate. To make it easy to verify this it would probably be a good idea to include ones game address in the post and, of course, a link back to ones own ad posting.
This would, hopefully, be a self-censoring system in that anyone who doesn't reciprocate after having their ads posted would not be likely to see any more exchanges initiated.
Any thoughts on this? Potentially useful? Very silly? Have I overlooked some huge, glaring holes? Please comment. :)
I am hoping to, after some feedback, work this into a set of guidelines for how to post the ads and conduct the actual exchanges. Points to cover would include how to provide updated ads (probably as edits of the original blog post), whether to include both an evaluated and a MUSH-formatted ad, and whether exchanges can be just mush-to-mush and perhaps web-to-web or also mush-to-web/web-to-mush. And probably some other things I haven't thought of yet.
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The method described seems a
The method described seems a bit complicated, perhaps overly so, with its posting of ads, cross referencing with comments, etc. It seems to be trying to fit something into this blog format, instead of having an actual system in place designed to accommodate the idea.
As far as the idea of exchanging ads itself, as MUSHes become more insular, I noticed the posting of other game ads declining. "If we let you post, then everyone will post, and our +bboard will crash."
I think what would be awesome, actually, would be a bot that pulled the c.p.o. RSS feed and posted +bbposts as Ads were created. This way, every ad is shared equally across those games that participate, and 'exchanges' aren't needed.
On the cpo side
It's super-easy to have cpo provide an RSS feed specifically of "ad"-type blog postings.
As I said on M*U*S'H, I do
As I said on M*U*S'H, I do like the bot & RSS idea. Possibly more prone to some abuse if someone posts an ad every week ... but maybe that is manageable even so.
I think you are right that MU*s have grown much more insular, in part to "hoard" players ... and I think its probably bad for most games except a few.
Leveraging the mushlist
Concerns were raised about multiple ads per MUSH and whether ads would need to be moderated. One possible approach that might help with both of these would be to tie the ad to a mushlist entry.
When someone adds an entry to the mushlist for a mush, the entry is moderated to make sure it's legit. So there's a little bit of protection there.
If we added to each mushlist entry a "current ad" field (well, probably 3 fields: title, body, and a timestamp), it would ensure only one ad per mush, and that someone more or less authorized to advertise for the mush is the one posting it.
With that approach, will the
With that approach, will the bot use the timestamp to decide whether or not to include an ad into the rss feed?
Perhaps it could then also be clever enough to not pick up the ad again, even if it is changed, unless X time has passed since it was last included in the RSS?
Feel free...
Feel free to use my mudtoberfest bbgroup updating widget as a template for simply updating an ad based on timestamp.
Reading some of these
Reading some of these comments so far, one idea I had was this:
Use the RSS Bot idea combined with the existing mushlist here or a similar one. Add a tag for advertising so to tell the system whether they want to be joined in the system or not.
Use some strict access guidelines on the rss script or maybe an additional php variable to tell the system that yes, this game has been advertised once and to cycle through to the next mush to be advertised.
Now with all that said, the key is to use a kind of weighted system. Increment a count of how many times a single mu* has been advertised and only advertise those with lower counts more often so hopefully they'll all be well evened out. As new mushes are added, default their ad count to the lowest known count in the current list so they aren't starting from 0 and get spammed all over initially.
Maybe through the RSS bot have another php variable on the RSS script that can provide an id of the mush the bot is running and advertising on as a way to confirm that they are reciprocating ads and to approve that mush for more advertising elsewhere.
Feel free to pick at this idea, just random thoughts. :)
+1
As I stated on M*U*S*H, I further agree with everyone agreeing with me, and agree with the idea of having an additional database field in the MUSHLIST for "current advertisement." This field can be preformatted text which can be pulled by the bot.
The only other thing we'd need is something like Talvo/Mike@M*U*S*H's helpfile encoder, or another encoder which will take normal people text and set it to MUSH compatible text.
As far as the bot, it should be unpriv, so that functions can be evaluated during the +bbpost command so that [ansi()] and other things work -- because you know some games want ANSI in their ad.
The only thing i have against
The only thing i have against having it do a +bbpost is what about those games that don't use a +bb style system? i know a lot of trek games fall into this category for instance.
Other methods
It would be up to the person installing the bot to code their non +bbpost command?
Why use a BB post at all? If
Why use a BB post at all? If the info is pulled from the c.p.o. website, the bot could be set up with a few $-commands that allows people to list games, filter by genre/age restrictions/etc (there are already several different fields like that on the MUSH list entries here), read the description of the game, and so on.
(Whether the filtering is done by the bot or the website doesn't really matter.)
For me, that moves too far
For me, that moves too far away from bringing information about new games to players as opposed to expecting players to seek it out at a community site. I don't see a bot that just interfaces with c.p.o passively as much of an advantage at all, could just post the link to c.p.o and make players aware of the mush list and leave it at that in that case.
I guess it could be a nice additional feature, but I think its essential for the idea to be able to add/update your ad and have that ad be posted to other games as opposed to waiting for players to seek it out via the list.
Based on what was said in the
Based on what was said in the comments, the following approach sounds pretty good to me:
1) Ads are added as a new field within the mushlist.
2) There would also need to be some way of timestamping when an ad is added and, ideally, when it is changed.
3) A bot is created that grabs the ads from the mushlist and reposts them on the participating games.
Questions that remain would be:
1) How can ads be restricted from being posted more than, for example, once a month, even if they are edited more often?
2) How can the ads being posted be limited to those from games that are actually participating in the exchange and not just adding ads and making no use of the bot?
3) Out of those interested in this project, is there anyone who is capable of creating the bot? That would seem to be the major technical challenge. I am entirely bot-clueless myself, I am afraid.