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This was a (small) part of our decision to remove all our stock areas a long time ago. While they have a couple perks (comfortable familiarity to players that have seen them elsewhere, obvious ease of startup, etc.), we kept running into questions like:
1) Can you radically change this area without the author's permission? To cross-reference the Bartle thread, what if you took a stock area and added lots of explicit sexual content for some reason? A given author might not want their name associated with it. Every game that isn't pure stock will make some changes to an area (even if it's just a new flag or setting added as part of a code change), but how much permission do you have to do this? DIKU allows (and encourages) you to change the code, but the DIKU team didn't write all of the enclosed areas to my knowledge, and no contact information is provided with most stock areas.
2) If you do change it, how is authorship handled? Obviously, it's improper to omit the original author because you made some changes to the area. It's equally improper to claim co-authorship if all you've done is to add a few lines here and there. If you start with a 50-room area and expand it to 200 rooms, are you now a co-author?
We settled all of this by stripping out the stock areas, having all our areas written for us, and having all of our authors agree in writing to some standard boilerplate that grants us our needed rights as administrators. But we had the time and human resources to do so. What's the best way for a new MUD to handle this?
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