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A big part of running a professional quality text game is adhering to professional methods and procedures on "the back end," in the design and maintentance of systems that players never see.
One very common "back end" system for commercial endeavors is data tracking; automatically and systematically tracking data about your customers, about how your product is used, when it is used, and where users come from,.
This applies to MUDs in some obvious ways. You can track referrers for new visitors to your website, you can track the "online time" of players, the rate (and locations) that coins enter the economy, you can log when valuable items are destroyed or when player killings occur.
My questions are, what have other MUD administrators chosen to track? What situations have come up where data tracking was unexpectedly useful? What do you wish you had tracked from the beginning but did not? How do you store your data and for how long do you keep it? Or any other interesting tidbits related to this topic.
-T
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