If you're going to have website and game on the same machine, you may as well code the http protocol into the game itself and have the game be its own website. It would listen on two ports, say 4000 and 80. A connection to port 4000 would be assumed to be telnet, and would be treated accordingly- namely, log in and play the game. A connection to port 80 would be assumed to be a webclient, and would be treated accordingly- namely, display web content. There are many many virtues to this: no more separate in-game boards and web-boards, the two would be one and the same and posting on one would be identical to posting on the other; ability to do various commands such as "who", "help", etc. from the webpage; possibly even the ability to log your character in on the webpage and do character-specific information commands ("score", "eq", etc.) If you wanted to really make yourself stand out you could even let people actually play over the http content, similar to games like . Players from outside the mud community are attracted to your webpage, play around for awhile bumping around the main town, then try to walk outside--- "To leave the city, download a mud client and connect to port 4000! (more detailed instructions)" There's a lot of potential for this sort of thing. And as long as we're at it, there's no need to limit this to just the website. The email server could also be coded into the game itself, allowing eg. imms to read their email in-game, and reply in-game! In fact any protocol you can think of, is just begging to be incorporated.