Top Mud Sites Forum - View Single Post - In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Aeran · 01-05-2009, 04:55 PM

MUDs can very well vanish, and can vanish as well. As a recent example take a look at the MudMagic/MudRage community. All of a sudden the website was closed down. It had a large code repository and discussion forums. The code repository was luckily made available for download but it is nothing that was guaranteed to happen. The forum discussions are lost. If the code repository had been gone forever, then many codebases and documents could have been lost with it.

Another example is the MudDev mailing list. The mailing list was closed down all of a sudden, and the discussion archive got lost. Someone did happen to have a backup of it though.

Then you have all those MUDs that simply close down, without making any of their work available after the closure. When such a MUD closes down then all of that "world"'s history is pretty much gone with it.

If the history of MUDs aren't written down then the mistakes done in the past will without doubt be done again in the future.

Edit: I kinda doubt writing down individual MUDs' history is Wikipedia's mission though. There's though.

01-05-2009, 04:55 PM	#82
Aeran Member Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 208	Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned. MUDs can very well vanish, and can vanish as well. As a recent example take a look at the MudMagic/MudRage community. All of a sudden the website was closed down. It had a large code repository and discussion forums. The code repository was luckily made available for download but it is nothing that was guaranteed to happen. The forum discussions are lost. If the code repository had been gone forever, then many codebases and documents could have been lost with it. Another example is the MudDev mailing list. The mailing list was closed down all of a sudden, and the discussion archive got lost. Someone did happen to have a backup of it though. Then you have all those MUDs that simply close down, without making any of their work available after the closure. When such a MUD closes down then all of that "world"'s history is pretty much gone with it. If the history of MUDs aren't written down then the mistakes done in the past will without doubt be done again in the future. Edit: I kinda doubt writing down individual MUDs' history is Wikipedia's mission though. There's though.