A group of head admins of some of the larger text muds are starting a small forum (not at all designed to compete with Topmudsites or Mudconnector) focused on high-signal discussions of issues involving established muds with at least a medium-small playerbase. We'd like to invite people to join, with the following requirements:
1. You need to be in the top two levels of administration on a qualifying text mud.
2. A qualifying text mud is one which has a -daily- peak of at least 50 simultaneous, active (non-afk) players.

You can find more info at: This isn't, however, intended to be an "Iron Realms" thing. We're just trying to get it started.

So far, the muds represented include: Aardwolf, Achaea, Aetolia, Armaggedon, Batmud, Discworld, Gemstone, Imperian, Materia Magica, Otherspace, Retromud.

The community is only just getting started and the forums aren't even skinned yet (they're at but we're all excited to turn it into something useful and interesting. Please sign up if you meet the criteria. Thanks!

--matt

And thus, Iron Realm's campaign to engulf and consume and get free advertising continues.

(Aardwolf, Achaea, Aetolia, Armaggedon, Batmud, Discworld, Gemstone, Imperian, Materia Magica, Otherspace, Retromud)
Welcome to the dark side.

I'm trying to figure out why these discussions couldn't have taken place on TMC or TMS. Forgive my ignorance but it sounds like an elite squad of "the popular MUD's" discluding us smaller MUD's.

No no =) It's just that the small muds aren't worth as much to mr CEO of Achaea. He wants to start stealing players from the big guys first.

I can almost see this being useful in concept - obviously the members of this forum are involved in running highly successful MUDs, and so must be doing something fairly right compared to the rest of us.

But why not let people who don't meet the qualifications still read the forum? I can't see why you would keep the discussions closed when so many people could benefit from hearing your ideas.

Breaking my own rule about not doing anything but posting announcements here: Because they don't happen on TMC or TMS. How many head admins of the most popular muds post here regularly? There's a reason for that absence and the consensus among said admins is that there's very little practical and useful discussion here. They're always sidetracked by people with strong opinions but no real-world experience to back it up. We'd just like to be able to engage in practical discussion with other knowledgeable people without having to deal with children who post things like (in response to us donating money to charity):

Soljax wrote:
That sort of thing really says it all to me. *shrug* A lot of people just aren't interested in forums that allow that kind of post and that kind of person to participate.

Actually, I didn't know that was an option. I've never run forum software before. I'll look into that though and ask the other forum members how they feel about having their discussions open to everyone. The downside may be that forum members grow less willing to share semi-confidential information with each other due to the fact that they don't know who is reading their posts.

If you've got other questions, feel free to mail me at I won't respond here.

--matt

I think these forums are a great idea. Applying right now.

Guess we don't qualify :p Have peaks of 50, just not daily :p

IMO, looking at the playerbase to judge the professionalism of a game and its developers is not very fair. But life isn't fair i guess :p There's some clubs you can't get into without enough money or fame too :p

It is a great initiative imo to create a forum like that, where you can actually discuss things without all the stupid flames and trolling going on as here and TMC.

It's a valid reason to create a separate forum.  TMS keeps things pretty wide open (for example, the existence of the Tavern) and loosely moderated in my opinion.  This is fine for encouraging a very wide variety of topics, but breadth is not what every user looks for.  Specialization has advantages.  There are things that a staff member of a larger MUD cares about that a player or a staff member on a small MUD doesn't care about, and vice versa.

Not to mention you can organize people into groups. Decide who you want to post and who not to.

I agree the forum is beneficial, just like others, I don't think it's fair to disclude those MUD's who aren't on the top 10 list. It's not as if all the intelligent people who can contribute ideas are on the bigger MUD's.

Us little people have a little brain power too.

Perhaps we'll create our own type of forum then.

Agreed, both with the_logos opinion that there is no longer any substantive discussion here without degenerating into flames.
And with the idea that cutting out the little guys will be just as harmful to the so-called "community".

BUT, I also feel that we need a better moderated board somewhere, which won't allow the immature flaming.  If the pay muds and larger free muds are able to bring that professionalism to a forum, which we cannot readily post to, but are able to read freely...
I cannot complain too much. Especially if we are given the priviledge of reading the discussions.

I do have a suggestion for them to consider-
Have a post availability for non-members. One where people who have a question, or a constructive comment on a thread, or are simply asking for clarification of a point/concept, may submit their post on a FULLY moderated basis. That way any chance of flaming is extinguished.
Censorship? Yes.
Fair? Possibly fairer for those who wish to truly contribute and learn from each other.
The best way to do things? Don't know, but it's better than the systems we have, and a way to keep the signal to noise ratio as low as possible.
It is easier to be substantive if you know blatant flames and trolls will be totally blocked. And it's much better, especially knowing we smaller muds would not normally be able to post otherwise.

--QS
(Who would gladly give up possible advertising for the chance to continue learning and sharing.)

I think Quicksilver hit the nail on the head.

Following on from Matt's "I'm leaving" post a short while ago, it really does feel (to me at least) as though he's only really posting to say "Now I've created my own forum, and you can't play there!". A sort of variation on the old "disgruntled ex-player creates their own mud" theme.

Of course it's his right to do just that, but I'm still not quite sure why he's posting it here when he's already established the invite list - other than to rub TMS posters noses in it.

Well don't forget about the mailing list - IMO a far better alternative to Matts new forums. Those who are currently developing the new generation of cutting-edge muds are not going to qualify for membership of this new forum, while those running ancient Diku muds that haven't changed for years will, and it is the former who (for me at least) provide the most thought-provoking discussion.

Even if that really was his intention, (which I doubt) can you really blame him for it, after the way he's been treated here? From what i've seen, 99% of the time he posts something, it's almost immediately jumped on by various others making personal attacks, accusing him of something, displaying open hatred for his business policy, etc.

I hope you'll forgive me for correcting you, but out of the muds listed for membership in Matt's announcement:

1 is an actual Diku - Armageddon

1 is a ROM (for now), which I guess you could call a Diku too if you wanted. Aardwolf would not fall under the category you describe, though, and will be a custom codebase in a year or two, likely.

3 are Custom LP MUD codebases

5 others are various other non-Diku custom codebases

1 isn't even a MUD - Otherspace is on a PennMUSH codebase

Maybe you should do some better fact-checking before you post. Or at least come up with some more convincing reasons why people would want to discuss on MUD-DEV.

I'm afraid he brought much of that upon himself with his self-admitted trolling. When you consider how many of his posts where little more than veiled attacks on other posters here, it's hardly surprising when some of those people decide to hold a grudge.

Of course, but in this case you've done no correcting. Please at least do me the courtesy of reading what I post before replying to it.

What I stated was "Those who are currently developing the new generation of cutting-edge muds are not going to qualify for membership of this new forum, while those running ancient Diku muds that haven't changed for years will". And that statement is absolutely true.

A MUSH is, in fact, a MUD. The above also helps explain why Brody decided to leave TMS...

Well, I've just recently joined the MUD-Dev list, and it seems to hold some valuable discussion so far.

Still I think an alternate forum for MUD Development that doesn't single out those who are still learning and developing their -own- MUD's, would be even more beneficial. And I really dislike the idea that my MUD is less significant or that I have less to contribute because I either don't have 50 players on average, or I'm still in development.

So we'll see what happens. If anything it'd give me another project to work on.

I assume it's to give the opportunity for other qualifying MUDs to make themselves known.

Don't you think that's a rather two-faced viewpoint? When Matt goes around insulting other people, you say "can you really blame him for it, after the way he's been treated here?", yet when those people give him the same back, it's "two wrongs don't make a right".

Matt deliberately trolled these forums and offended a lot of people, and it would be naive not to expect some of those people to hold a grudge. What goes around, comes around.

So, apparently, do quite a few of us. But that's what Matt appears to have done, and that's his right. However it's also our right to comment on it.

A team of developers creating a next generation mud with cutting-edge technology will not qualify for his forum, while the girl (or boy) who's been given an implementor position on her boyfriend's old stock Diku with a 50+ playerbase will. Which would you rather hold discussions with?

That is why I prefer MUD-DEV - everyone is welcome, and the signal/noise ratio is maintained through strict moderation. In fact, the Advanced Mud Concepts forum on here is handled exactly the same way.

According to statements made by themselves, some of the Muds joining this new 'closed' discussion list, intend to not take part in any discussions on the Forums here any longer. They DO however still intend to use these Forums to post promotions, advertisments and announcements about their games.

Does this not bother anyone but me? There is an expression for people that just take without giving anything in return;  'skimming the cream off the milk'. Or, to put it more bluntly, 'sponging'.

Wouldn't it have been a bit more fitting, if the people, who obviously look on other posters on these boards with such disdain, left the boards completely?

This community once was about contributing and sharing. The discussions on these boards were once interesting and intense. They could sometimes be heated, but the tone, with a few exceptions,  was generally civil. Trolling was very rare. People on these boards once respected the opinions and knowledge of others. There also was a general respect for other peoples work, and ethics and morals still seemed to mean something to most posters.

Why this has all changed lately can be debated. In my opinion at least some of the fault lies with the person who is now complaining the loudest. He set the tone, others followed.

I for one have not given up hope on these boards, and I have no intention of leaving.  Since I have been here almost from the start, I know for certain that several posters here have intelligent and interesting contributions to make about our mutual interest, the creation and development of Muds, although they may not have been very vocal in the last year or so.

Competence in my eyes is neither measured by the size of your playerbase, nor by how much money you can make from your mud. Many Administrators of small muds are extremely good at what they are doing, and many experimental Muds have far more interesting things to offer than those that just cater for quantity.

A fact is however, that free Muds and commercial Muds have rather different goals. And consequently it is perhaps not such a bad thing if the bigger commercials withdraw to their own 'Exclusive Discussion Club'. Perhaps if in the future there are less threads here about purely materialistic things and more about coding, building and administrating muds, the boards could be restored to what they once were, before the decay set in.

Well, Kavir, as you can probably tell by my account creation date, I haven't really been on these forums all that long. I shall poke around some, but please feel free to PM me links with pointers to some of the horrible things he's said, and i'll gladly take that into account.

Failing that, I can only go on what i've seen in the time i've been here. And I still maintain the viewpoint that whatever else has gone on, it's got to stop somewhere.

Hmm, I wonder if you could graph the implosion that will happen in a year to that forum. TMS and TMC's forums have perservered somewhat, I think, because the member list is so large, and thus big flaming discussions don't affect everyone, but essentially, I think most MUDers and MUD owners are too prideful to hold up a real community. Oh well, community doesn't matter in the short term at least. No community, though, and in ten (or fewer) years, most MUDs will stagnate because there's no place for new players to find new MUDs.

Whee.

Hi there Molly! And guess what - you're wrong. I've wanted a reason to say that to someone all week, and you got picked!

I'll now explain:

First, I acknowledge that your opinion is jut that, and not based on any actual facts. Just as mine is mine, not based on them either.

I'm not a mud admin, and I haven't been a staffer for any game for awhile now. I'm just a player, and I leave it to the game's admin to actively do their promoting. You'll notice that with the exception of a few posts this week, I rarely post anymore.

Is that because of Matt? Is it because of commercial games making noise? Nah. It's because of posers and flamers and people who say one thing, then recant and claim they meant another when someone calls them on it. Such as you've done in the past making veiled snide remarks about pay-to-play games, and then saying "Oh I didn't mean that!"

So you're wrong about why people aren't contributing other than a bunch of flamers and lamers. It's because - the flamers and lamers are louder, and the rest of us don't want to deal with it. So we sit back and watch, and hopefully get a laugh out of the whole thing.

As for sponging goes, meh. Call me a sponge. Doesn't bother me a bit. I get lots from this website, and I rarely contribute a thing other than the occasional post in a debate such as this. If it bothers you that much that I'm such a leech, um..tough, I guess. I ain't leaving just because my existence offends your delicate sensitivities.

Regarding the exclusive forum being created, you mentioned:
If you'd taken a few minutes to actually read the information Matt presented, you'd see that there are many games being represented by the list, most of which are _NOT_ commercial. Further, I know of one commercial company in particular that meets the qualifications for the discussion group, which isn't a member of it. I imagine there are plenty of others as well.

Personally, I have no stake in whether or not the new discussion project succeeds or fails. But I've noticed that Matt has not taken potshots at other ventures lately, EXCEPT when he's been thrown up with his back against the wall.

To KaVir - you gave me a chance to chill out when I first came aboard and started going nuts with my trolling, because I didn't know any better and refused to accept that this isn't happy fun-land. Matt *seems* to have been doing the same lately. How about giving him the benefit of the doubt and stop taking potshots at him every time he posts anything, anywhere, about anything?

Or, do you enjoy putting his back up against the wall, simply because you know you can? Or, are you sincerely hoping to drive him away? Because if you are, you'll be driving away some of his player base as well..and those are the people this forum was designed for in the first place. Fans of Muds.

I don't think the community has changed at all. It seems to me that people just remember the past fondly. People have been complaining about twink players for at least 15 years now, they've been complaining about kids running stock muds for 10+ years, and they've been flaming each other for 4000+ years.

Top Mud Sites isn't old enough to warrant this perception that "so much has changed since the begining".

Here's a post from KaVir on May 2002 (Advanced MUD Concepts):

That was over a year ago. If we could go back even farther in time when TMS had a different board system we would see the exact same stuff we see today.

I'd recommend browsing through the old posts and checking to see if there really was a difference back then, I can't find one.

These boards haven't changed, there's always been flamers and people who take any excuse to bash as long as I can remember it. The same goes for most lightly-moderated boards on the Internet (for example, most MUD newsgroups).

Don't lump all of the MUDs who joined the list into the "we hate you so we're going over here" group. Some of them probably just wanted to see what the others were up to.

As far as certain people inciting arguments against themselves: arrogance is very annoying. Publicizing your game is one thing; insulting other games in the process and talking about how much money you're making and how better your game is than everyone else's, even if it's "true" in your eyes, is not. It's pretty #### arrogant, and that's going to tick anyone off. Some are just better than keeping their mouths shut than others.

Just thought I'd mention that over on the forums there seem to be devoid of the flaming and trolling. Although they may not be fabulously popular with the masses, it's all been pretty friendly from the beginning.

We've noticed that there seems to be less of this sort of thing just because the forums require registration before viewing. I'm not sure why this is, but perhaps people feel more accountable if they have to provide info before being able to even see the board.

The forums are open to anyone who wishes to register as well.

Well that depends, KaVir.

Assume the following issues, for example:

* Attracting and securing investment.
* Advertising: What places work, what places don't.
* Server Co-Location, T-1 leasing, etc.
* Server manufacturers.
* Legal Issues: copyright, trademark, patent, etc.
* Security: Maintaining a good security plan, setting up firewalls, etc.

I think I would find it more beneficial to discuss issues like the above with people who have DONE those things and have had to deal with those issues on a large scale.

From what I have read, The Mind's Eye does not sound like a forum that focusses on coding issues or micro issues of game design. It seems to focus a lot more on macro issues that involve large game management, business related issues, and such large matters as I listed above.

The problem with opening up discussions like that to everyone is not only having to sort through the flames and trolls, but having to sort through the BS from know-it-alls with absolutely zero experience. For example, the fact that someone's 6 person mud has had no problems with their shared hosting package at Mom & Pop Server Hosting, Inc. is really not a piece of information that is very valuable to people who need mission critical reliability in their server hosting.

I would agree with you 100% if the focus of the forum was on discussing ground breaking game development ideas, advanced mud features, etc. But it does not sound like that is the goal.

For issues more related to game design, features, or just community chat, I think TMS is still the best mud community site around.

There are many muds out there who don't meet the capacity requirements not out of any lack on the muds part, but because they belong to a smaller subset of gamers.  Muds that are tightly bound to a specifc obscure theme for example, or muds that have high standards.  Several of these are run by very experienced staff. To say that your mud must meet a certain popularity requirement unnecessarily limits the number of experienced admins who could give valuable feedback to such a forum.

Muds with representatives recently added to Mindseye:
Threshold, Islands of Myth (formerly Red Dragon), Feudal Realms, Discworld, Necromium, and Carrion Fields. I urge you to join if you meet the requirements. Who knows if the group will survive (there may not be enough traffic with the requirements for membership) but it's worth a try.

As regards the earlier discussion about opening the list to being read by all, the current group members came down heavily on the side of "no" for a couple reasons:
1. We may discuss things we don't wish our respective playerbases to read. There's nothing nefarious there, but if we're discussing a design problem or an upcoming event we would like to be able to share information with each other and know that it's unlikely too many people outside of the membership list will ever see it.
2. We don't really want to deal with the inevitable bitter types who will copy posts from there and repost them here or on TMC in order to flame a poster.

Sorry, but human nature dictates the purpose of the group cannot be fulfilled if we allow open read access. I understand this is disappointing to some people (and no doubt those who seek any excuse to attack me will continue to babble) but please understand that it's not an attempt to be exclusionary for the sake of being exclusionary: It's an attempt to create a group specifically for the needs/desires of administrators of larger muds, which are somewhat different from smaller ones. 50 is an arbitrary number but then any number we picked would be fairly arbitrary. The only other solution we could come up with was hand-picking people but that smacks of potential unfairness as whoever is doing the hand-picking is going to have biases. (Voting isn't really an option as it's too unwieldy.)

Now, I understand some of you are likely to still say, "But I'm not an idiot just because I don't run a larger mud." No one is calling you an idiot, or incompetent, or anything of the like. However, if you don't actually run a large mud you've not got much to contribute to a forum that is specifically for the concerns of larger muds. Experience in whatever we're discussing is what matters to us and if you don't have the experience of running a larger mud then there's not much reason to have you in the forum.

Sorry to disappoint anyone but that's how it's going to be for now at least. Join us, grow your mud and join us, wish us luck, or heck, go ahead and curse us out. Every post attacking this group validates the reasoning behind why we made the group in the first place, and, in fact, the attacks in this thread are the primary reason that certain group members are VERY against open access (and I'm slightly more ambivalent about it than a couple of other group members).

--matt

What if the topic of discussion is how to run a large mud?

What if the topic is one of the things I listed in reply to KaVir?

What if the topic is how to maintain a sense of community even when your game reaches hundreds of concurrent users?

Would someone running a small mud be able to provide valuable experience on those matters?

Do you feel insulted by every group or organization that excludes you because you do not fit their membership requirements? Should english majors be mad that they are not allowed to join IEEE?

Really, there is way too much being made about this. How can so many people be so unable or unwilling to accept that large and/or commercial muds face unique issues that other muds do not face? Isn't this obvious?

Note, though, that while administrating large MUDs is completely away from my domain of competencies, mission-critical service availability is something I deal with daily in my job - on the service provider side.

This is typically the kind of real-world experience which could benefit certain large-scale MUDs within the realm of their specific issues. To take your English major example, a linguist might actually be of help to the W3 Consortium...

Anyway, enjoy yourselves.

I've joined the forum being discussied. I also read and post to MUD-Dev (which I think any good Mud developer should definitely be subscribed to), and I read these forums, as well as occasionally posting. I read Imaginary Realities when it was being produced, and went so far as to briefly work on the MUD Journal. Periodically I do random google searches on MUDs, or poke around on gamesites. In short, I look for discussion regarding MUDs wherever I can because the more information/discussion/exhange there is, the better, at least in my opinion. Show me a message board with good content and I'm there.

Nothing in this statement of the supposed purpose of this group lends itself to the idea that only topics concerning large or commercial muds will be discussed.   There are many, many issues involved in running a mud, large or small. And many of those issues have nothing to do with the popularity of the mud.

 If this is the reply to Kavir you are referring to,... What, do you think that only an admin of a popular mudsite has this type of experience?  What about those of us who consult for a living? I certainly have considerable knowledge about co-location facilities, T1s, firewalls, setting up load balanced servers,  server hardware, etc.  I've also worked as a professional 3d game developer as a lead c++ programmer so I know a good bit about game design, copyrights, licensing third-party 'middleware', etc.

Look, all I was trying to say is that the single requirement that a mud have an avg. online presence of 50+ players is too limiting.  You have *no* idea who some of these mud implementors are, what they do for a living or what kind of experience they have.  

Further, i was not at all insulted by the original post, you go do whatever you like, I have no time for yet another forum anyway nor any interest in joining yet another 'high-signal' 'advanced' mud forum.  I was just commenting that I believe the group is limiting it's options unnecessarily.

Can you think of any alternatives that will filter out the trolls and people with very little experience, yet not take up large amounts of the moderators time?

Could we just bring this puerile thread to a close please it really isn’t going anywhere. If a group of people wish to establish a new select forum then surely that is their business, not that I can personally see any lasting value in it.

It’s all well and good to shriek in the first instance ‘why can’t we be a part’ but to be honest my initial thought was, based on creative and intellectual quality of the posts I’ve seen by a number of the members, ‘why would I want to be a part’. It all seems a bit like walking with dinosaurs to me - stagnating muds talking about tired ideas and things that are intriguingly sterile, readily apparent to anyone with an ounce of business acumen and system knowledge.

If I’d seen any of these muds make any moves towards developing something progressive, original, and inventive within their <a href=" onmouseover="window.status = 'goto: games';return 1" onmouseout="window.status=''">games</a> over recent years then I might be inclined to think differently, but I haven’t.

I think the greatest irony that is dripping from this select reservoir of knowledge is a simple fact. That with all the founders’ great experience the chosen method for drawing attention to the Mindseye (Hofstadter and Dennet are groaning as I type) was advertising on this forum – very creative grasshopper.

To Trespassor, Vedic and others who do not believe that these boards have changed.

Maybe you have just not been here long enough to see the change. Sure there has always been some flamers and trolls, but they were resonably few before. A fact is that there has been a very noticeable decline in the quality of postings since about the time when the old Forums where deleted and the new ones put in.

And if the quote from KaVir is supposed to prove the point that there is no such decline, you picked a bad example. If you actually read what he says, you can see that he is referring to exactly the same thing that I am talking about:

Trespassor wrote:

You're making generalisations of the people on these forums by something Soljax, a well known low-of-the-low, scum-of-the-scum, banned-of-the-banned, trouble player, said?

Well that's just brilliant. That really says it all to me.

Threshold:
Maybe an alternate way to get in: submission of a relevant article to the list.

Or just a straight resume submission.

This is totally beside the point: as we recently found out, people will even complain when you give money to charity :)

The important thing is to maximize the value to the group- I agree with the people who have pointed out that you're leaving out many potentially valuable contributors.

On the other hand, there was a good point made about keeping the group small and controlled (aside from quality of posts) to allow discussion of topics that you don't want to immediately become general public knowledge.

I would worry a bit that with the present criterion, the group won't have the critical mass (and periodic fresh blood) to survive in the long run in the sense of an active group discussing new ideas regularly, though it may do fine as an occasional place for members to ask questions of each other.

Stilton

Absolutely - those are the sort of things which are of significant importance to any starting mud.  Unfortunately the only people able to ask such questions are those who no longer have much need for the answers.  Indeed, those who would really benefit from such advice won't even be able to read the forums.

It doesn't seem to be the goal, true, but there is always some crossover.  A mud without any ground-breaking features is less likely to attract or keep a large playerbase, after all.  Subjects of discussion might include systems which keep players interested for longer, different types of coded support for newbies to stop them leaving after 10 seconds, "popular" features or styles of interface which make players from other codebases feel more comfortable, etc.

There would no doubt also be interest in how best to handle large playerbases - not just physically handling a large number of connections, but also in terms of gameplay; a mud needs to have enough things for everyone to do (eg some of the MMORPGs suffered in that there were not enough worthwhile locations in which to hunt mobs).

I ran a mud which easily filfilled Matt's requirements, long before he started working on Achaea - and had shut it down by the time you created Threshold - but that is not the point.  I do not feel insulted, I simply feel that his new forum is counter-productive.  His new "bio" requirement is certainly an improvement (in that it cuts out those who fill the other requirements without being of any benefit to the forums), but it also cuts out a huge percentage of the people who could provide valuable experience.

Stilton already provided some better alternatives.  The approach used by MUD-DEV back when I first joined (you needed to be invited by another member) also worked quite well, although some sort of moderation is going to be required whatever approach is taken.  Strict moderation is how I handle the Advanced Mud Concepts forum on here, and it manages to achieve an excellent signal/noise ratio IMO.  But if the_logos really doesn't like taking our advice, perhaps he should ask his Armageddon members how they filter new players to determine which will be of benefit to their game?  Armageddon is renowned for its roleplaying, after all, so they must be doing something right.

The rants on trolling brings back memories...

Someone created a "which is the best pk mud" thread (I can't remember the exact name) and all of the players from Groundzero decided to pick that day to find this forum. I don't remember how long the thread was by the time everyone got bored, but I hope there's a log of that somewhere; putting that in a help file on my own MUD would make for a good example of why the MUD isn't focused on RP or "intelligent, well-spoken, considerate people."

As far as Minds Eye is concerned...everyone's pretty much discussed every angle of the attack/defense of the forum. And in the end, everything ends up in an archive somewhere; wait long enough, and the forum will end or start to release its earlier threads, and we'll all drink from the fountain of wisdom by our masters, the Imps Of Really Big Muds.

-Visko

I think you missed my point here.

Of course those issues are important to people starting a mud. But the people starting one do not have any experience HANDLING those issues and therefore their presence would not be helpful to the other members. That doesn't make for a very mutually beneficial relationship.

I don't think ANYONE thinks the membership requirements are perfect. But what *are* perfect requirments? If it was invitation only you'd have accusations of favoritism and elitism. There really is no system that would be perfect or free from critique.

As for the read access, the immaturity level of people not eligible has already shown why that won't work. There is a "chilling effect" to discussion when you have to worry about disgruntled jerks taking something you posted one place and posting it elsewhere just to flame you. Also, as Matt noted, there are things discussed that admins would not want their playerbases to know about in advance.

There are plenty of places already where someone starting a new mud can benefit from the experience of people who have already done it. TMC, TMS, and MUD-DEV are three examples.

The Mind's Eye is a place where people who are already running large and/or commercial games can share experiences and get advice from other people (and here's the key) facing and dealing with the exact same issues.

For example, and please forgive me if this sounds harsh, I really don't want or need advice on trademark law, marketing, or how to secure financial investment from a 12 year old who just downloaded ROM.

Many of us are happy to help those who start out simply because we all had to start somewhere - thus there are places like TMS or TMC which let us all advertise for free, while asking nothing in return. Who knows? One day, one of those newbies might be in a position to offer you help or suggestions. Wouldn't it be a shame if they refused because they didn't feel they were getting anything out of it?

Well from my interpretation of requirement 3 ("After you apply and are accepted..."), it already is invitation only - however there's [i]also[i/] the requirement that you have to be in a top two admin position on a 50+ playerbase mud. Nothing wrong with favouritism, but it seems like you're cutting your own throat by rejecting those who would be extremely useful to the forums on the basis that they don't also run a popular mud.

However you will also be exclusing those who perform such activities professionally, unless they also happen to be top-nobs on a mud with a large playerbase. Is it worth avoiding the legal advice from the 12-year-old kid when by doing so you also loose the legal opinion of a copyright lawyer?

In summary: I understand what you're doing, and you are of course welcome to do it, but I think you're cutting out the best sources of knowledge just to try and give the impression of being "fair". The phrase "throwing out the wheat with the chaff" springs to mind.

If The Mind's Eye was the *only* discussion forum in existence, then yes that would be a shame. Fortunately, that isn't the case.

To make an analogy: donating money to charity is a very good thing. Donating ALL of your money to charity is just foolish.

Not EVERY discussion forum needs to be open to everyone and have a good percentage of its traffic made up of newbies asking for help.

Established admins need help as well sometimes on more complicated issues and it is a lot more useful to get that help from people who have actually EXPERIENCED the same situations.


While it would of course be nice to have the PERFECT set of people on a discussion forum that just is not possible.

In light of that, simply being able to discuss issues like those I already listed with people who are currently dealing with them for the same reasons I am dealing with them is something I look forward to.

If the issue was copyright law of course it would be nice to discuss it with an IP lawyer. But assuming no easy way to guarantee the presence of a copyright lawyer, I'd rather discuss the issue with mud admins who have hired a copyright lawyer than the aforementioned 12 year old who just downloaded ROM. At the very least, the mud admin in question would have advice on how to find the right lawyer (or may even be able to give a referral).


In my experience reading tons of discussion forums, the presence of the 12 year old know-it-all tends to preclude the presence of the copyright lawyer.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but usually professionals get deterred when they see the kind of flame wars and trolls that too often pollute most discussion groups.


When it comes to web discussion forums, the problem is that each piece of chaff can sometimes rot the entire supply of wheat.

1 troll can write 1000 flames that drown out 50 good posters who write 100 posts. Moderation is not always the answer because the task of moderation becomes exceptionally onerous.

I don't see why people with MUDs that don't fit the criteria are complaining, I mean they already rule TMC, topmudsites and other forums.

Kael (or whoever you're an alias for), I had a mud that fit the criteria over eight years ago. I am not "complaining", I am just trying to point out why I feel the requirements are counter-productive to the goals of the new forum. Regardless, I wish the_logos and the others the best of luck.