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Comment by tgarv | Hacker News Reader

The character could possibly become drunk immediately after sending the "I am not drunk" message, so you'd need to check if the character was still not drunk after sending the FriendNet messages. But assuming that drunkenness lasts much longer than it takes to send the FriendNet messages, you could be sure that if the character was not drunk before and after, then the messages in between were also valid.

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> so you'd need to check if the character was still not drunk after sending the FriendNet messages

Just send a checksum with the message.

Yes this would work, even though the message could get garbled including the checksum, you make the first set of characters be a checksum for the rest. If the checksum or message became compromised it would fail validation. This is the best solution so far. Send it with every message.

Or use error-correcting codes so you can get your list accross even if you're drunk :D

That probably would've worked fine in WoW yeah. Definitely not in EQ though, the "smashed" level made it pretty much impossible to communicate (outside of the channels which were added later on), and the game became… challenging to play

What do you mean by error-correcting codes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_detection_and_correction#...

I think it's safe to assume that a drunk checksum would fail to match the message, drunk or sober. So check summing the checksum may not be needed.

Or even better, depending on length limits on message, you could prepend every message with a sentence to check. If it is not OK, discard the entire message. If it is, process the rest.

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