Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

In case y'all didn't already know; The Discussion Forum on TMC closed down yesterday.

The Listings and other Mud info are still up, but in the end the actions of a small group of Trolls and Griefers went so far, that the community there couldn't handle it any longer. So Icculus took the decision to close down the Forums altogether.

Maybe this is yet another sign of the Text Mud community slowly drying out and dying. I notice the Forums here are not exactly active either. Perhaps some of the regular posters on TMC will trickle over here in time and liven it up a bit?

Hopefully you won't get the Trolls and Griefers too...

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

Molly, recently the voting system there was changed, such that in order to vote for the game of choice, you had to a) have an account and b) post a minimum of 5 posts on the forum.

The forum is now closed. Does this mean new voters are not allowed to vote at all? Or has the posting rule been removed from the coded voting system?

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

The posting rule is being removed (if it hasn't been already).

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

Actually I talked to Icculus about this as late as yesterday. He said that he had to go back to the old routine, before TMC had that spam vote attack against Armageddon, which is what originally caused the 5 post rule.

It means that you still need an account to vote, but the 5 post restriction is - or soon will be - removed.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

I also pointed this out to Icculus!

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

Thanks guys. And - for what it's worth, thank you ALL for moderating. Once in awhile I'd disagree with your choices but for the most part I thought you all did a great job at trying to keep things progressing. Just a few members seemed hell-bent on regression, stagnation, or outright destruction. I still wish y'all had just banned the 2-3 people who rejected civility in favor of chaos. But in the long run you did what you needed to do what was right for you. I'll miss the fora there, and hope to see you maybe in a new incarnation somewhere else.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

You'll probably see us in our old incarnations here. :)

I believe we all have old accounts on TMS.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

I really hope so, this place could use some life.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

Molly, did Andy say anything about maybe letting the forums back?
Thanks!
- Dave.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

It is actually being discussed.

But it may take some time, and even if it does happen - (and I am not saying it will happen for sure, since that is completely Icculus' decision) - it will not be the same.

The interface will be different, and above all, it will not be "troll friendly".

For now, I guess we'll all just have to keep our fingers crossed.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

All that drama is surprising and yet it isn't. I run a community as well and sometimes things like this happen and if not checked right away it festers and becomes almost uncontrollable.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

Where's my five bucks.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

It's a pity that it has to be checked.
We are not a bunch of kids any more, most mudplayers are well above 30 by now and have kids of their own. One would have hoped that a strong common interest would have been more important to the community than internal squabbling.

I believe in free speech myself, and thought that grownups would be able to control themselves. Obviously I was wrong in that.

Anyhow; the TMC Forums are coming back up, and this time under harder control. Trolls are not just going to be checked, they'll be stopped from even entering. This will of course lead to much less traffic, which really is not what the Text Mud Community needs, since we appear to be a slowly dying breed.

But hopefully there will still be some discussions.
Because, if there is anything worse than a discussion Forum going out of hand, it is a dead discussion Forum.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

True, however online age is just a number and people like to use perceived anonymity to do whatever they want.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

I'll give you 5 bucks just because your avatar is so iconic!

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

OK, the new Forums on TMC are up and running.
For now even oldtime members need to post a new application, and get it accepted before you can join the discussions. Which might take a few hours, depending on the time of day.
The posts can however be read by anyone.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

> Maybe this is yet another sign of the Text Mud community slowly
> drying out and dying. I notice the Forums here are not exactly
> active either. Perhaps some of the regular posters on TMC will
> trickle over here in time and liven it up a bit?

Well, to be fair - the forum software here has not been updated
in ages. I prefer the phpBB forum style.

But anyway, two more things to note:

- I have noticed that some webforums (fora?) are dying or becoming
less active in general. I can not pinpoint to all reasons but a
partial one is that a lot of the communication moved to e. g.
Facebook. I give you an example - there are some local universities
here (in central europe) and the unified students pages usually
were done by the mandatory elected board of students; in other
words, they ran a (or several) phpBB forum. A few years ago,
less and less traffic happened there, whereas traffic increased
on Facebook. I think this is largely because Facebook emphasized
instant communication, which may help more in smartphone style of
communication; but may be more rapid in general.

This is not the only factor of course but I think quite a bit has
changed in regards to webforum; also discourse replacing phpBB
slowly.

- To your other comment, I think you are right - oldschool text
MUDs are dying out.

I used to play two LP-MUDs (Xyllomer and GEAS; GEAS was some sort
of successor to Xyllomer but both struggled immensely as the years
passed by). In the late 1990s, the former had a peak count of
+60 players playing at the same time (peak count meaning maximum
per given day). In a few years, they lost a lot of players, even
to the point where GEAS had more players (e. g. 24 players peak
count in 2010, with the total count being at 33 connections, so
the rest were guest accounts, wizards + wiz-testies logged in).

From 2012 to 2015, both (!) MUDs suicided more or less by nerfing
'who' - aka to quickly determine who else is playing and how
active it is. They even did cross-MUD nerfs, based on people such
as PO Okkita copy/pasting his awful ideas between the MUDs (and
the admin also having given up on the game prior to this, which
was the real game-killer here).

Now the above is only mostly my observation here, but it is true
that text-MUDs have it really hard. For one, younger people often
do something else; for two, a smaller playerbase means less fun,
which is a massive problem. People just won't stay connected if
nobody else is playing.

Another reason is that awful nerfs are done that kill a game,
with an admin that is strapped for time (they don't have time
since it is a hobby) and won't listen to the complaints. All
of this increases the decay cycle - which is a shame since you
used to have more players in these games in the past.

All of the above COULD be managed but it requires clever game
designers with lots of time and a willingness to listen, which
also appears to die out too.

I don't think the whole genre will die out completely since
there is always a chance to run a successful MUD if you have
a motivated and clever admin - but it is indeed much harder
than it was in e. g. the late 1990s or very early 2000s.

For me personally, the number one reason why I am no longer
playing in MUDs is simply lack of time. And I don't think this
can change simply due to the reallife constraints. But even if
I were to have had time, I would not play on GEAS due to
the admin; and I no longer really actively play on Xyllomer
largely because the code base is not as interesting enough
(GEAS had the better code base, but in both MUDs admin
more or less fatigued or had too many reallife obligations.
Note that GEAS originated from Xyllomer in the late
1990s due to a "fork" - LPC is a horrible language too. Might
fit into the 1990s but should have been replaced by a much
simpler one lateron. It's difficult to find people willing to
want to learn such an awful language, if you compare it
to modern "light-weight" languages.)

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

I like the new forums though I'm more of a fan of the old format. What I like about the new forums is that rule for civility. Hopefully it will last. We'll see.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

I'm shocked it took me over a year to notice this. Last time I checked TMC its forums had been radically changed and was some weird homebrew setup I didn't care for, but they still existed at least. Checked today and spent a few minutes trying to locate where the link to the forums was before googling mudconnect forums and finding this thread.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

This thread was created after several of us resigned from the moderator team, and Icculus decided to shelve the whole thing.

Shortly after, he added new forum software in the form of "discourse" which never took off.

It was about 3 weeks ago several of us noticed that the discourse stuff was taken down.

So no, it didn't take you a year to notice lol :p

I'm not exactly sure when the discourse stuff was actually taken offline, but you're only about 3 weeks behind a handful of us.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

As HK says we noticed the forums were down about 3-4 weeks ago, i emailed Icculus to ask if this was a permanent thing, and got a reply saying it was, and that due to the lack of new posts he was closing them. Quite why he chose forum software that he had to pay for, i am unsure. Far better way wouldve been to have left the forums up, with no active moderation, as now we have lost tons of interesting posts (with lots of trolling in between). Losing the TMC forums is a loss to the entire mud community, as they were one of the longest standing forums online along with the archived original forums that were ported across to the SMF software.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

Yeah, I mentioned to Hades on discord that despite me not having used TMC regularly in the past couple years that checking in and seeing that its forums were completely gone saddened me.

I spent 10-15 years posting on the forums nearly daily, so it's really not an exaggeration to say that it's like driving by a home I once lived in and witnessing it being bulldozed.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

I can tell you why. No posts. I would post with roleplay events on Ateraan periodically but I never saw anything substantial or important very often, maybe once a month since it went to discord. Couple of reasons why I think this happened:

1) You had to have approval for every post. That was insane waiting for days for a post to be approved so I'm guessing most people said "Screw this".

2) I asked for authorization for an entire year to post without approval like all the moderators and some others had. Never happened. Again another reason why I'm guessing a lot of people who would post dropped off.

3) Without posts and interaction you get lack of visitors.

4) The Discord forum system and connection to TMC really sucked compared to the old TMC forums. I couldn't figure out how to get there half the time and when informing the player base they responded with answers 1 to 3 above.

It is very sad because I loved TMC and its whole setup as a 2nd location with TMS. The two best locations for MUD information on the net.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

Wrong, if you had the required "badges" from your time spent on the site your posts no longer required approval, the more you connected to the site the more "badges" you were able to obtain, the more you obtained the more features opened up, you just had to be be very active to get them. I managed to get to almost moderator level by just visiting daily.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

I was wondering that myself, seems like it would be cheaper to self host Discourse or even better, NodeBB which doesn't require the use of docker.

Re: Mudconnect.com has closed their Discussion Forum
 

Wow! Had no idea, I would swing by once every week or two but definitely not daily. I got a bunch of badges, wrote the moderators, but never knew I had to visit daily. I had been there at least 100 times though and posted 15 or 20 times.