MSSP

MSSP is telnet option 70. A crawler sends IAC DO MSSP; a server that supports it replies with a table of name/value pairs describing itself — name, player count, codebase, uptime, hostname, port, genre, and whatever else it cares to publish.

It is the closest thing this hobby has to a machine-readable directory entry, and it is the reason several directories exist at all.

Everything in an MSSP report is an assertion

This is the point on which this site differs from every incumbent. An MSSP report is the game telling you about itself. GMCP 1 in an MSSP table means somebody typed 1 into a configuration file, possibly in 2011. It is not evidence that the server offers GMCP, and the two disagree often enough to be interesting.

So MSSP-derived facts are labelled declared here, and where we can measure the same fact — a capability, by seeing whether the option is actually negotiated — both are shown, side by side, with an age on each. A game whose MSSP has declared GMCP for six years and has never once offered it in a handshake is a fact worth knowing, and there is nowhere else you can find it.

The one field we deliberately do not credit at all is CREATED. It is a single hand-typed line, and crediting it toward anything would make that thing trivially gameable.

Who answers it

MSSP is the Diku and LP answer. In our own 38-codebase survey, 28 published a player count through MSSP and seven through a login-screen WHO, and only two did both — the two families are very nearly disjoint. AresMUSH, TinyMUX, MUCK, RhostMUSH, CobraMUSH and TinyMUSH offer no MSSP whatsoever.

That is the empirical case for probing four layers rather than one: a crawler built on MSSP alone cannot see most of the MUSH family, which is a large part of the hobby and most of this site's intended audience.

Ask, do not wait

A great many servers that fully support MSSP will never volunteer it — they answer IAC DO MSSP and say nothing otherwise. A crawler that opens with IAC WILL NAWS and waits therefore reports those games as publishing nothing, which is a claim about the server made out of the crawler's own silence. We send IAC DO MSSP on connect.

The plaintext form

There is an older variant in which a client sends the literal line MSSP-REQUEST at the login screen. We measured it: of twenty games tried, three answered — and all three also answered telnet option 70, so it reached nothing the option did not already reach. Eight servers read the request as a character name and said so, spending one of the login attempts a stranger is allowed. We do not send it.