In any case, this is very important. Several months ago, a coder DBT had hired let a friend into the shell of our mud, and that person copied our mud without permission or either owner's knowledge.

That person then attempted to use our code to make a mud(without even name changes...they actually tried to be us.) We got it shut down in short order. Then a few months later, the same clone we reopened by a friend of the theif, this time they made superficial changes such as name etc. We got that clone shut down off of their server in short order.

Now, just a few days ago, a banned member from our mud(the coder who let his friend into the shell) started the clone up again with one of the people who had attempted it before. This coder, who never ever coded anything in himself, thinks that he has claim to our codebase just because he saw the inside of our shell v.v

These people insult DBT's code(very outdated version they have) yet they are too lazy to make success for themselves by starting fresh. It's funny...

Anyway, I am asking that these theives not be allowed the honor of being considered a legit mud, or getting to advertise for a mud that was made possible through thievery.

Address: 24.50.42.68
port: 3686

Compare to our's and see the proof. Several expamples being the zones, score layout, help files, startup ascii(which they uglified a bit)
Address: dbt.teras-hosting.com
Port: 1280

Anyone against code theivery should support our posistion. This clone of our mud should not be allowed to succeed just because they are too lazy to make success of their own.

If you make your coders sign NDA's, you might be able to legally prosecute them for it.

I am the only coder for the MUD now, mainly because of this reason. And I didn't do that at the time :/

I don't want to prosecute anyone, I just want the lamers to drop the clone and work on making THEIR own mud.

Edit:
We are in talks with their server's connection provider over the issue, but I don't know if that will work out. And their server owner is one of the people with the clone, so that avenue is offlimits to resolve the issue.

Speaking from experience you're gonna find yourself SOL sooner or later. Best thing you can do is make sure your code/areas are secure and be wayyyy more careful who you trust with access in the future - also, I can appreciate that this is hard, but try not to give any publicity to their mud ever again (e.g. giving the link), as the saying goes "no publicity is bad publicity".

Codebases get stolen a lot. There are some screwed up people in this world. At least they havent rm -rf *.* ....

Don't worry about it. Chances are it'll just be a few of their friends who play on it.

Focus on making your MUD better, not getting rid of their knock-off. Be honoured in that with the hundreds of available codebases out there, they chose to steal your modified one.