MUD fans, possibly only in the NW in the late 90s - did you ever play a MUD that had a replica of Garfield High School in Seattle in it, complete with teachers, rooms, etc? I am desperately hoping it is archived somewhere!
For those wanting to just look at a list of MUDs in a nice clean format, check out: http://mudstats.com
It can be filtered by genre, players on now, max within last 30 days, etc. At this moment it says "There are currently 832 active MUDs listed."
It uses the Mud Server Status Protocol (MSSP) to get its information, which was created because: "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."
This is such an awesome, anachronistic mix of the shiny new and the internet of yore.
It's a shame MUDs expect you to be constantly interacting, I keep being slow and having them time out on me (then having to ;;reset to revive the session ...)
Social MU*s usually have a keepalive option that does some silent character exchange in the background with the client every so often to keep the connection open.
Parent is most likely referring to the telnet GOAHEAD character and its related SUPPRESS GOAHEAD protocol: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc858
I am the author of a MUD client for iOS[0] that, like most other clients, will capture and silently discard the GOAHEAD character. GOAHEAD is most common on MUSHes but I've seen them in a few MUDs as well.
Damn. They didn't include MUME, one of the oldest active MUDs and based on LotR (and a game I've played for twenty years, in fact meeting my wife through that game): http://www.mume.org
Good to see a fellow MUME player in this thread! I was hoping MUME would be mentioned. I'm no longer active but played some from 2002-2008. And apparently I last logged in 28 months ago. Great MUD.
Would also like to give some props to Discworld MUD, which served as both my introduction to MUDs and to the Discworld book series. Still hanging in there, and being actively developed, almost 25 years after it was founded. It sports one of the smartest command parsers I've encountered in any MUD.
I was recently considering writing a MUD-like multiplayer text adventure game in Clojure and Clojurescript that used RethinkDB change feeds over WebSockets (through the excellent sente library).
Not quite what you're asking for though.
Maybe if I get some time in the coming weeks I'll give it a shot.
~~~Time for my yearly MUD mystery call-out!~~~
MUD fans, possibly only in the NW in the late 90s - did you ever play a MUD that had a replica of Garfield High School in Seattle in it, complete with teachers, rooms, etc? I am desperately hoping it is archived somewhere!