Discussion Thread

[Terry Disz]

This mail list ought to be good for more than just sending attachments, and
since we are all having a hard time being in the same place at the same
time, I thought I would try and start a discussion thread.

What I want to discuss is scalability, in terms of what do we do if the AG
becomes really successful and there are bazillions of venues, or more. I
think this discussion is important because any possible solutions go
directly to Venue requirements and I don't want us to miss a requirement
because we didn't think hard enough about this problem.

So, here's the issue - we at Argonne have been promoting the idea that
venues should be linked with door-like objects, and we can navigate from
venue to venue, just like the MUD. Although this can be fun, and can be
interesting in a social-experiment way, it's easy to see that this doesn't
scale very well when we start to talk about hundreds, let alone bazillions
of interconnected venues. Without structure, it would quickly become
impossible to find things and use the venues to conduct business.

Although we have a stake in this idea, I think it might be a little wobbly
and I wonder if we shouldn't be talking about alternatives, or at least
about ways of imposing or discovering structure  in a network of linked
venues.

Looking to some of our users, I know of at least two who operate venue
servers that have just a list of venues that users can choose and be
directly ported there. This idea of an index on a set of venues and a method
of jumping directly to one seems to be attractive to some. I know,
transiting venues is a fairly heavy operation today, but I think the problem
goes deeper and these other solutions would still exist even if transiting
were fast, as with the MUD today.

Other ideas on what to do for scalability are;
1. dispatch venue-discovery bots to create a database to answer
google-search questions
2. Create a set of Yellow pages to help find venues by purpose.
3. Create a set of white pages to help find venues by name.


Put on your thinking caps -  what about scalability? How do we provide it?
What requirements do these solutions have for the venue? What are your
ideas?

Terry