[scandum]

The impression I get is that people aren't overly concerned (myself included) when it comes to helping newbies, unless of course it's their own mud the newbie wants to connect to.

I'd reconstruct what happened as following:

1) Newbie wants to play a mud.
2) Newbie fails because the website isn't working.
3) Newbie googles for info but being a newbie he fails.
4) Newbie googles for newbie mud help and finds TMS.
5) Newbie bothers to create an account and posts a message.
6) Newbie sees a lot of people view his message but do not bother to respond.
7) Newbie gives a shout out
8) Newbie is told he's impatient and is told to google it up.
9) Newbie gets ****ed. (see 3 and 4)
10) Newbie gets a link to the broken website. (see 2)
11) Newbie gets even more ****ed. (see 9)

This all could be avoided if people actually try to be helpful and do not assume total and utter incompetence on the side of the newbie.

Since I have nothing better to do I give a reconstruction of the possible existence of a Good Scandum:

1) Good Scandum sees a newbie who needs help.
2) Good Scandum googles up the webpage and tries to connect.
3) Good Scandum double checks the telnet addy on TIC using a proxy to bypass his ban.
4) Good Scandum posts a reply giving the correct addy of the mud.
5) Evil Scandum takes over and adds to the reply that the newbie should use tintin++ to connect because all other means to connect suck.
6) Newbie thanks Good Scandum and Evil Scandum for their lovely advise and quick help.