[scandum]

MUD listings are often out dated and lack accurate information. Verifying that the one submitting a new MUD is a member of the MUD's administration can be quite tedious as well.

The MUD Server Status Protocol (MSSP) seeks to address these issues by providing a transparent protocol for MUD crawlers to gather detailed information about a MUD, including dynamic information like boot time and number of online players. MSSP also simplifies submitting a new mud entry as it only requires a player or admin to fill in the hostname and port.

MSSP is implemented by 40 MUD servers, 9 codebases, and 2 MUD directories as of March 2010.

Implementing MSSP is easy by using the Plaintext version. Whenever a new connection inputs MSSP-REQUEST the MUD sends back a series of tab and new line delimited variables and values. MUDs that don't want to clutter their command interface can implement MSSP as a TELNET sub negotiation instead.

Implementation details, links, and various resources are available on the page.

[Markov_AU]

This is a very good idea!

[Samson]

You can add AFKMud to your list of codebases, it has supported plaintext MSSP since 2.1.1.

[scandum]

Added AFKMud.