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Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)

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69 points shakna | 1 comments | 26 Apr 25 01:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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HocusLocus ◴[27 Apr 25 00:19 UTC] No.43808383[source]▶
For a whole year ~2016 I put a version of this Adventure on my unused Telnet and FTP ports. I allowed only a single thread, and any human could play the game to its conclusion. I logged all keystrokes and point in the game where they exited, and the 'signon banner' was the whole introductory paragraph of the game. "Would you like instructions+Yes" so there would have been no confusion about what someone had connected to. I limited output to 30CPS to slow things down to the vintage BBS speed I used once.

After a year of logs, lots and lots of logs: ALL bots and login probes, ZERO humans. Even the humans who examined log entries may have been enticed to try it. So only the bots are poking, and the humans operating them are not paying attention. It left me with a sense of sadness and dread.

replies(1): >>43812512 #
1. spcebar ◴[27 Apr 25 15:16 UTC] No.43812512[source]▶
I had the exact same experience hosting my own text adventure on a Telnet server! Endless bots trying to log into the "press 1 to start, press 2 to load" screen. My secret dream was that a bot would write some weird sequence of commands and accidentally play through my game, though we never got there. Telnet is the lingua franca of insecure IoT devices, so it's not surprising (though sad) that any FTP server will immediately become a juicy target for bots. Wrote a blog post about it here, of anyone's interested. https://benergize.com/2020/09/06/some-people-hate-it-oldscho...