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Old 08-06-2013, 03:55 PM   #41
Achon
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

So the owner sabotages may years of time and effort, damaging relationships
along the way in a final act that would seem ultimately futile, in order to
'displace guilt' associated with an identity crisis?

Geez! Wouldn't it be easier to just accept his own words, rather than attempt
to conduct a psychoanalysis based on such meager information?

Didn't Freud allegedly say something like, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?
I'm gonna go with the cigar conclusion here.
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Old 08-06-2013, 04:15 PM   #42
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

He did say that. And the operative word is "sometimes." Otherwise, his own writings would have been significantly shorter

My analysis is, like everyone else's, pure speculation based on the perceived behavior of an internet persona. That said, in life I have found that the simplest explanation is rarely the correct one.
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Old 08-06-2013, 05:26 PM   #43
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

I stayed out of the the thread on Mudconnector, because it was very obvious almost from the beginning that it was headed in a very wrong direction. I did follow the thread, however, and in retrospect I rather wish I hadn't, since it revealed opinions and biases in some of the posters, that I had preferrred not to know about.

Like most members of the Mud community in general and TMC in particular, I'd naturally find it very sad if a prestigious Mud site like TMC would go down - it has after all been the main hub of the Mud world for over 15 years.

But instead of just speculating about what plans the owner might have with his site, the easiest way is of course to ask Icculus himself via an e-mail, and several TMC members, including myself, have done just that. And from what he says in his responses, he is planning to turn the site over to a group of interested users, and at present he is looking for the best possible crew.

It's obvious that he still cares enough for TMC to take this trouble, and I'm hopeful that TMC will remain a service to the Mud community, and that the Forums will open for posters again soon.
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Old 08-06-2013, 06:35 PM   #44
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

I am glad this thread exists.

The TMS forums are by far the best MUD community forums on the internet. I much prefer reading about and discussing anything MUD related here.
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Old 08-06-2013, 07:13 PM   #45
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

I agree that it is sad when such a significant and positive element of the MUD community is in danger of ceasing to exist.

I disagree, however, that has been the main hub of the Mud world for the last 5+ years. I think TopMudSites took over that role some time ago and has maintained it.

has by far the best forums and the best collection of active, experienced mud admins and game developers. Many if not most of the maintainers of the major MUD clients are active here either posting, reading, or both. Last but not least, it has a great group of players from a wide variety of types of MUDs.

The last few times there have been important issues threatening the MUD community, by far the best place to learn about and discuss those threats was right here. Wikipedia admins came HERE to discuss them, for example.

I salute TMC and the huge role it played in the history of MUDs, but honestly, it fell into disrepair many years ago. The forums have been an absolute abomination for a long, long time. You have to wonder about the motives of anyone willing to tolerate both the cumbersome forum software and the huge troll segment of the population there.

I don't know how Icculus tolerated that heavy troll population. Strangely, some of the same people who are utterly horrible on the TMC forums behave themselves much better here and on other sites. Its almost like even the members of the TMC forum community acknowledged decided as a group to treat TMC like 4chan and just ruin it for everyone else. Fortunately, there are great alternatives (TopMudSites) for people who want to have worthwhile discussions about MUDs.

That is the way of things. Just like TMC supplanted Doran's Mudlist, so too has TopMudSites supplanted TMC.
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Old 08-06-2013, 07:16 PM   #46
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

I want whatever you're smoking.

TMS forums have been a ghost town since the site changed ownership years ago.

TMS has always been muc less trafficked than TMC, and for the last 5 years has also been much less trafficked than MudBytes.
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Old 08-06-2013, 08:07 PM   #47
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

I offered to either buy TMC from Andrew or donate a similar sum to a charity of his choice, and then to put real work into revitalizing TMC (goodness knows, the site design and forum software desperately needs it). Apparently I was too late though, as he told me he's already got someone(s) he's working with to pass it along to.

I hope whoever it is is willing and able to put real resources into it rather than just let it languish as it's done for quite a long time. Andrew ran a great site, but it's been a long time since he's been involved, as he himself would no doubt admit.

Also, for those of you who think he stopped caring a long time ago, I'm not really sure that's true. For instance, when we stopped advertising there, he lost most of his income from the site, and subsequently stopped accepting advertising. We offered to buy it from him but he decided to just keep running it anyway, saying he was too attached with it to part with it (and not like we were offering him half a million dollars for it or anything either).

That was 18 months ago or so, maybe 2 years, and he may have had a change of heart, but certainly at that point my impression was that however uninvolved he was, he still placed a lot of personal value on the site.
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Old 08-06-2013, 08:11 PM   #48
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

That may be the case in the forums, but isn't the case on the sites themselves. TMC and TMS both get far more traffic than Mudbytes does according to Alexa, Google's traffic analysis, etc. Alexa is the easeist to access there, and while, like all estimations of traffic, is notoriously unreliable, TMC and TMS both have Alexa ranks in the mid 300k, while Mudbytes is down at 1.7 million.
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Old 08-06-2013, 11:08 PM   #49
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

This site is the best place to go for forums and mud discussion. I honestly prefer TMC's listing structure/format for finding muds (I'll look here when I'm looking for a specific mud, there when I'm searching for muds in general). Mudbytes is kind of irrelevant alongside TMS and TMC. It gets an honorable mention, but if you're not keeping up with the big two sites, you're missing out on the mud community, while you can get by without some of the lesser known sites.
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Old 08-06-2013, 11:11 PM   #50
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

Yeah, talked to him via email a few days back. Great to see that it's going to continue on. My game's been listed on TMC for 15 years... 8 months, 3 weeks... And I don't think we got in right when TMC went up.

That's a _long_ contribution to our games guys. Thanks Andy.
- Dave.
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Old 08-06-2013, 11:52 PM   #51
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

It's his right to put a banner like that up, but he invites commentary when he does.

I just deleted the site from my favorites and went on with my life.
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Old 08-07-2013, 12:00 AM   #52
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

^^^

What Logos said.

TMS forum traffic can be bursty, but when there is an actual issue of interest to the MUD community, this is by far *the* place to discuss it.

IMHO, TMS has the best, cleanest, most functional forum of all the MUD sites I've seen.

It also has the most diverse and inclusive community. There are other sites with subset cliques of the MUD community, and that's great. I am glad they exist. Anything that keeps the community thriving is a good thing.

But the TMS community is the most widely representative of entire ecosystem: game developers (both professional and hobbyist), players, client developers, outsiders interested in the genre, etc.
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Old 08-07-2013, 12:01 AM   #53
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

Well said and that's pretty much how I use the two sites as well.

The TMC searchable database is nice.

For forums and discussion, TMS is the tops.
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Old 08-07-2013, 02:11 AM   #54
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

The sad truth is that both the TMC and TMS Forums have been pretty dead for the last few years, due to the equally sad fact that text Muds seem to be slowly dying.

The really interesting discussions are few and far between nowadays, and it takes a major event, like one of them potentially closing down, to spark some activity again. The main traffic probably comes from the voting buttons, not the Forums, and even the voting rate has diminished significantly. The total active population of the text mud world has probably been halfed by now, and not much new blood is coming in.

And burying our heads in the sand won't help much.
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Old 08-07-2013, 04:44 AM   #55
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

I do not know. I read the thread and the whole thing made really little sense.
However, putting a religious banner in a mud website is beyond my comprehension. As far as I remember, D&D had problems about mentioning demons, and stuff. Since then, I always thought that religions and RPG has been separated.
Just my opinion as a player, but the reaction against the banner was rather predictable. I mean, if I see a religious banner on the website of the MUD I am playing, I will privately complain, and ultimately quit.
On a different note, the TMC issue is a problem for all the mudding community. I hope that a replacement is found soon.
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Old 08-07-2013, 05:35 AM   #56
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

TMS and TMC get a lot more traffic for their listings. MudBytes has more active discussion forums, but people don't send their players there multiple times per day to click on voting links.
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Old 08-07-2013, 09:24 AM   #57
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

Oh, come off your horse now. You have no right to judge him as a person period. If you didn't like the direction TMC was heading, then get off your ass (as they would say) and create your own MUD site that's better.

TMC was obviously designed to be self-sustainable with little to no administration. That alone is a good look for the administration because let's face it, he could hand it off and that person could lose interest too. MUD's aren't exactly popular right now and when you secure the future that it will always be up under your wing, that's a good look for the community rather it coming completely offline in another persons hands.

But, that's not the case anymore. Now it will likely go under new ownership with no outlook of the future. The entire site could change for the good or for the worse. It may stay up another 10 years, it may go down next year. The outlook is uncertain if the site does switch hands versus the original owner.

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Old 08-07-2013, 10:07 AM   #58
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

It was the forums that I was primarily referring to.

Threshold's posts were preaching that this was *the* site to have MUD related discussions on - discussions don't benefit from players being sent here on a daily basis to click a vote button.

TMS forums only have 49,836 posts.

Sounds like a big number I suppose, until you break that down into posts per day, the forums have existed for 4,126 days.

12.08 posts per day is the mean for the site, the median is almost surely much lower due to topics of interest sparking up every now and then which result in far more posts on specific days than others.

That's also the mean all-time since April 2002. I'm sure the average post amount per day in 2002 was much, much, higher than it has been in any recent year.

MudBytes has 63,837 posts and is barely half as old as topmudsites forums.

63837/2640=24.18 posts per day, over double that of TMS.

And then there's TMC: 90,856 posts in 3,612 days for 25.16 days, slightly beating MudBytes and once again more than doubling TMS in posts per day.

MUDBytes might get the honorable mention in terms of traffic, but the honorable mention has always been TMS when referring to the forums specifically.

It's just an old version of vBulletin, which I would agree is a better forum software than most MUD forums use if it weren't for the "old" in that sentence.

Due to its age it get targeted by millions of spambots, as can be seen:

I've ran forums with far more posters, and far more activity, that ran on newer versions of vBulletin that virtually never had spambots successfully register.

The only reason vBulletin is better than alternatives like, say - phpBB3 is because unlike them it isn't free.

Note the lack of "real" accounts listed.

It has more commercial MUD admin, less of just about everything else. It's not the most widely representative, it's the least widely representative. Commercial MUDs are just about the smallest niche in the MUD community - not in regards to the size of their playerbase, but in regards to the actual amount of commercial MUDs. Over 99% of all MUDs are ran as a hobby. The fact that commercial MUD admin are such a large part of this community goes to show how non-representative it is of the community, not how representative it is.

You mean like you're judging Plamzi?

A different set of rules don't apply to site administrators than to everyone else.

You seem to have no problem making judgement of your own against those you disagree with.

Everyone has the right to judge everyone as a person. You might not like it, but that doesn't change it.

Last edited by Fizban : 08-07-2013 at 10:49 AM.
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Old 08-07-2013, 10:35 AM   #59
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

Let me clarify.

Unless you're running a MUD site, then you don't have to right to judge someone on how they are running that site. Especially being that site is the top of it's class for it's topic. To me, you have no right to judge in that case.

Plamzi and I are both frequent followers of that site. We are on the same level in my eyes. That's why I was calling him out specifically based on his comment and opinions. Even more so when site admins normally don't have the luxury of calling out comments like that without ridicule.

You may not agree with that logic and that's fine. But to me, if you don't have experience doing something, then you should likely keep your mouth shut when trying to pass judgement or telling others what they should do in a negative way. And I say likely, because this is just my assumption and my opinion Sir Fizban.

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Old 08-07-2013, 10:41 AM   #60
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Re: FYI Mudconnector forums shut down

Logical fallacies abound.

Your posts boil down to: You don't have the right to do things I wouldn't do.

People have the right to do a lot of things they probably shouldn't do.

Icculus putting up the banner is in my eyes a pretty accurate example of this.

He certainly had the right to do so whether I think he should have done so or not though.

Just because you don't feel Plamzi should do something does not equate to him not having the right to do so.

By trying to determine what other people can and can't do you're being far more judgmental than the person you're chastising for being judgmental.
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