A text-based virtual conference venue, accessible via telnet, MUD clients, or over the web.

A multi-user, located environment where the rooms correspond to the relevant rooms of a conference hall: a registration desk, a lobby, a hallways or two, lecture halls, and some private rooms/secluded spaces. Maybe a hotel bar?

Think: IRC where you can only be in one place at a time.

Think: a MUD without 'mechanics' that's linked up to the conference schedule and events.

In an ideal world, this tool would replace sli.do (for question asking) and Slack (for general communication).

The 'room' mechanism will allow for serendipitous hallway-track interaction. Being text-based means there's a low technological bar for entry (unlike VR), and also allows for "lurking"---just like how people sit and work on their laptos.

There should be a 1-1 mapping of rooms to URLs. You can enter a URL into the MUD client and you'll go right there.

How should session management work?

What happens when you open multiple room URLs?

Room descriptions should make it easy to share a link to "go here immediately".

Private rooms are password/identity protected. How does management for that work? How long do they stick around?

Anonymous, easy use has to be an option. Web users are anonymous by default.

Let people enter an email address and confirm to get privileges (e.g., create private rooms) and also have badges associated with their names (author, presenter, organizer, etc.)

Ban individuals, IPs, IP ranges.

Announce globally whatever @POPLconf tweets.

Some way of setting a schedule, and having announcements happen there?

Maybe no logs for users? Just server-side event logs, let people sort it out themselves. MUD clients log well, and we can offer downloads in the HTML view.

We do need to keep careful track of resource use.

• Tokio https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/blob/master/examples/chat.rs
• Hyper CSRF protection?

https://docs.rs/flate2/1.0.14/flate2/ https://tintin.mudhalla.net/protocols/exop/ MCCP2 is code 86

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code https://mudhalla.net/tintin/info/ansicolor/

Flat-file organization, like ROM MUD pfiles? Could even hardcode rooms to start (but need to create private rooms on the fly).

World map Rooms know who's in them

Session IDs map to: player (how are anonymous people represented... HTTP session UUID?)

HTTP pull drains buffer