This page is part of the documentation on the MOOseum Tools Project, a collaboration between Kalí Tal and ConnectionsMOO. The purpose of this project is to provide a suite of tools based on a museum metaphor to humanities scholars who are interested in integrating new media technology into their courses. The tools, currently under development, will be distributed freely as a suite, and will run on LambdaCore, JHCore and enCOre MOOs. If you are interested in beta testing these tools, contact Kalí Tal.
Items typed <inside angle brackets> should be typed without the brackets when you give commands on the MOO. For instance, if you saw the following command:
@create #624 named <name of your animatronic>
You would type:
@create #624 MyAnimatronicName
[The generic timecard feature, created by Percival/Tari, 8/28/99. Questions, problems, bug reports to Percival/Tari.]
A timecard feature keeps track of the connection times for those who use the feature. Users of the feature can get reports on their own session times. The owner of the feature can get those reports for all users of the feature. Owners can have the records from the feature printed to them in prose form inside the MOO, or mailed to them either in prose form or in a comma-delimited (csv) format that can be imported into a database or spreadsheet program.
Ethical behavior dictates that records like this should be considered private information; although you could of course see when a given person logs in and out by using regular MOO features like "@who" and the login watcher, compiling a list of a person's behavior over time is an invasion of privacy, and you should treat the information from your timecard feature as privileged. A user who signs onto your timecard is giving YOU permission to access those statistics. If you are going to share them further, even with other members of the class or group, either remove the names and object numbers from the records, or obtain each user's permission to use his or her name or character name.
To set up a timecard feature, first create a child of the generic timecard feature:
@create #1313 named <name of your timecard feature>
Then register the feature using this command:
@reg <feature>
This command registers the feature with the feature registry so that users can do `@addfeature <timecard>' rather than needing the object number of the feature.
Some hints for owners:
To add a timecard feature (and allow its owner to keep statistics about your connection times):
@addfeature <timecard>
To remove a timecard feature:
@rmfeature <timecard>
To see the record a timecard feature currently has for you:
@connected
Following the timecard record, you will also see a report of your total time spent connected to the MOO, regardless of how long you've been using the feature. That information is only given to you, not to the owner of the timecard. At the end of the report, the MOO will ask you whether you want a copy of the report sent to your registered email address. Simply answer `yes' or `no' to the prompt, according to whether you want the report mailed to you or not.
Note: if you have added more than one timecard feature to yourself, the command `@connected' will only give you the report from the first timecard feature in your list. This is a product of the way MOO features work; sorry.
To see who is using your timecard feature:
@users for <timecard>
To print the timecard's current records to your MOO window in a prose format:
showme all on <timecard>
To print the timecard's current records for a particular user:
showme <person> on timecard
"Person" is the user's character name.
To mail yourself the timecard's current records in a prose format:
mailme log from <timecard>
To mail yourself the timecard's current records in a comma-delimited, or csv, format:
mailme csv from <timecard>
To clear the current records from the timecard:
reset <timecard>
You will be prompted to make sure you really want to reset the timecard, because when you do, the data will be erased from the timecard feature, and if you haven't saved it anywhere else, it is completely lost. Please DO reset your timecard when you have saved the data to another location--all that data will eat up MOO resources and use up your quota!
When you receive your csv format report, save it in a file and import it into your spreadsheet or database program. Each line is a user's single session, so one user may have more than one line. The columns will be as follows:
Docent | Exhibit Stand | Guestbook | Notepad | Random Narrator | Timecard