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After reading the article and its counter-arguments, one user said it best. MMORPGs and MUDs may be on the same team, but they are different creatures. However, this is all semantics - when I write "MUD" here, everyone knows exactly what the connotation is. When you write "MMORPG" here, the connotation, for most, becomes fuzzier, as it is widely accepted in the MUDing community that MMORPGs typically refer to graphical based games - the syntax, semantics, and dictionary definitions of the terms do not change their connotation.
Internet slang is a rampant-running monster - you could almost teach it as a class by itself, that is how indepth it has become. When I took a couple of classes on Sociology of Internet Communities at Penn State, the pure volume of internet slangs, dialects, etc was insane. The point of this is to say that syntax and semantics rarely matter with online communities.
To the very vast majority of people here, MUDs are text-based online, multi-player roleplaying games that require some form of "MUD Client" to run.
To the very vast majority of people here, MMORPGs are graphical massive(far, far more populated than MUDs, in nearly every case), multi-player, online RPGs - this term conjures such images as Everquest, WoW, Guildwars, City of Heroes, and whatever other popular MMORPGs run rampant at the time.
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In conclusion, it was an interesting article, but semantics will never win out to sociological connotation in an online environment.
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