This is the perlmoo Frequently Asked Questions list. Q: I entered ansi escape sequences and the moo accepted them, and I turned the screen black on black / beeped other users / drew a pretty picture. Shouldn't this be disabled? A: I don't think the moo should be responsible for setting policy on this. Some applications of perlmoo may use escape sequences for valid purposes - some people like colored moo's, some people may even like the occasional beep. If someone abuses it, they should be reported to the moo's wizards and delt with. With that said, there is an easy technical fix, just modify Person.pm's tell() or parse() functions to strip high-bit characters. Or, use a moo client that filters out stuff you don't like. Q: How well does perlmoo scale? A: This isn't yet tested in real life. Someone please start a wildly successful perlmoo server so I can get some real numbers? ;-) I haven't done any optimizations at all yet. I've done some testing on how well it scales to large numbers of objects -- on my pentium 166 with 80 mb of ram, I created 1000 people, 1000 objects, 1000 rooms, and 1000 exits (see stresstest.pl). The resulting perlmoo process took up 18684k -- 14168k more than it does with the base db. Dumping the database took 2 minutes, and generated a 1360k file. Loading it again took 15 minutes. Connecting to the moo and getting a login prompt took 9 seconds. Logging in as wizard from there was an additional 12 seconds. Most commands took about 15 seconds, once I was logged in. Then I dropped all the stuff I was carrying, moved to a new room, and tried some commands. Most things were exactly as fast as in a perlmoo with 14 objects. In general, the only problems you seem to run into with large numbers of objects is if there are many objects in a single room (or container or person). Then they all need to be looked through for each verb that is run. If there are only a reasonable number of objects in a room, then the only operations that take too long are ones that involve scanning the whole list of objects - anything that uses FindByType or FindByName in the code. (Those are prime optimization candidates).