Plugin Wizard and Importing Plugins

Heya Nick,

I recall a thread ages ago where people kept abusing imports to import plugins, actually tearing them apart and making them not function right. If I remember correctly, you chose to take out importing functionality from plugins so it could not be abused anymore. This has a nasty side-effect, though.

Today, I ended up helping the victim of the Plugin Wizard. He never even noticed the by-default-CHECKED box that removes selected items from your world. So, he ended up being unable to fiddle around with his triggers/aliases since notepad and such aren't all that user-friendly. When I found him, he was about to manually recreate all 50 of those triggers from memory. Ouch. :(

Importing wouldn't work either, since plugins can not be imported. He was told to load it in the Plugins screen. I walked him through selecting, copying and pasting it in the interface manually, but he'd never have figured that out for himself.


So, I suggest the following changes:

1) Don't make that 'dangerous' selectbox checked by default?
2) Instead of disabling Importing from a plugin, make it pop up a 'warning' box with a Yes/No choice that asks: 'Are you sure you wish to import this plugin into your world? If you wish to use this plugin, choose No and load it using the Plugins screen, as that is the correct way to use them.'

You can manually import aliases, triggers, etc from a plugin, you just open it up in a text editor, select the aliases, triggers, whatever block like this:

<aliases>
<alias
match="alias1"
send_to="1"
sequence="100"
>
<send>send1</send>
</alias>
</aliases>

Then copy to clipboard, switch to your world, open the alias/trigger/whatever dialog and click the paste button.

However, I agree that checkbox shouldn't be checked by default. It's a lot easier to delete aliases, etc after the fact then it is to put them back.

Well my argument was, if you have carefully selected dozens of triggers/aliases/variables that are relevant to your plugin, *not* having them removed is a pain, because you now have duplicates - one in the plugin, and one in the main world. Then you have to carefully remember which ones, which are now in the plugin, have to be deleted from the main world.

To get them back, if you open the plugin file, skip the <plugin> ... </plugin> part, you can then copy the rest (excepting the final </muclient> tag) as a block and use File -> Import to get everything back.

That's the gist of what I told this person to do, but fact remains it is very user-unfriendly.

Besides, it wasn't a matter of 'carefully selecting triggers and aliases' ... they were all selected from the get go. A new user to MUSH isn't so sure about the (dis)advantages of plugins, and franky I can understand the 'let's just try to make one and see how it ends up' method of figuring things out. Sadly, unless you are already familliar with plugins, the xml format and how to manipulate it are alien to those people. 'Just kill the <plugin> and <muclient> tags, and you'll be fine.' isn't as easy for them to do as it might be to us.