mudinfo.net

Sorry in advance for the wall of text!

So a while back when I was still serious about bringing back my old board, VOID BBS, I had been doing as I always do when I immerse myself into a topic that I care about: I find every scrap of information that I can find on the internet and then compile it into sensible form and plop it onto my personal Wiki. I have generally used this Wiki as sort of an extension to my mind (think digital post-it notes), we are all human and humans forget things; in response I like to document what I learn. I find that I learn better and also have a cheat sheet to look back on. Well sometime around the end of 2015 I entered into a project with a friend to build a Database site for a very popular free game on Steam at the time. Long story short, we mocked up about 1/3rd of the project so we could show what we were working on to the developers of the game. Basically we wanted to know a) was it okay to be doing so and b) making sure were weren't infringing on anything they already had planned. Well it turns out they were literally 99% done building one of their own and while they appreciated what we were trying to do they kindly told us we would instantly be phased out the moment theirs launched due to its direct integration with the game. Well about three months later I took the core backbone of that site (with my friends permission) and converted the entire thing into what was going to be known as The MajorMUD Database. This site was set to be akin to sites like Wowhead (for World of Warcraft) or Curse (for Minecraft) in that it would be the central one-stop shop for all in-game information. I did not want to replace the chat channels (you can see I even linked them all) but more for just information about the game itself.

The Site: The MajorMUD Database
(I really don't like the fonts I chose now that I look back on the site... LOL... they will probably change, at least the obnoxious one will)

Needless to say I was unemployed at the time and pretty soon I did not have time to work on it anymore (I got a job).

Honestly I thought that was the end of it, I hadn't much thought about the site since, kind of forgot about it (sort-of, I still dreamed every once in a while). Recently I started cleaning up all of my website stuff (personal site, wiki, etc.) getting ready for a big hardware switch. I made the switch from Google Analytics to my own personally hosted open source analytics package at the same time (Piwik if your curious). My Google Analytics had been broken for months (maybe years) and I really did not want to fix it because I really did not want to be feeding them any more free data. However, once I got my analytics back up I noticed something that utterly shocked me. I get more traffic to my Wiki about MajorMUD than any other traffic that flows through the 5 sites that are hosted on my server. I then this morning was contacted via email by a very nice gentleman giving me some minor corrections for one of my MajorMUD Wiki articles.

All of this has me thinking again, would it be worth it to finish the MajorMUD Database? or would it maybe be more beneficial to keep going like I originally was with the content on Wiki³? If I had some time again, is this something people believe others would use or benefit from? or maybe they would benefit from? Which finally brings me to my main question, while through all my work it may appear that I have quite a deal of knowledge about MajorMUD and WG BBS in general, most of this is Worldgroup knowledge. I am a developer and administrator by trade (I like tinkering), and like my work, I always ran/tinkered with MUD, but I never actually played that much. Don't get me wrong I love the game and enjoy playing but my history of characters would be laughable to most. Therefore I leave an open invitation for anyone who would want to, or be willing to, assist me with pushing one of these forward to completion or near-completion. If so please get in contact with me, I am hoping to start being able to dedicate some time towards it soon (job permitting). I also have absolutely no problem open sourcing the database, I was going to anyway at some point.

On a side note, one thing that I wanted to archive on the web in some form as well is my Worldgroup collection, I already did so with all of the MajorMUD versions (on the MajorMUD Database, look in Tools>Downloads). I don't mean this as a boast but, I no doubt probably have one of the larger collections of Worldgroup "crap" that exists. That being said, I am still a little iffy on all the copyright stuffs and whether or not I should publicly post any of it.

Cheers,
Kyau

TL;DR: click the link, does it look cool? should I finish it? would you help?

P.S. Apologies if I posted this in the wrong section, was a little unsure where to post.

On one hand it upsets me to see yet another site trying to assemble MajorMUD information. I wish people would put the effort into updating this site instead. This game is not popular and in that sense I feel as though lots of information spread out over many different places is actually bad for the community. This isn't dungeons and dragons, for example. Having different information in different places just leads to confusion because inevitably one will be more updated than the other and then people will get inaccurate and misleading info, or think it simply doesn't exist because they don't even know about the other source.

On the other hand, I would by lying if I didn't say that the layout structure of a wiki is far far better than a forum for simple information archival and retrieval, which unfortunately is what mudinfo.net has become due to the facebook groups. And you've done a great job on your layout. I originally kept this as a forum because I thought it would be better/easier for people to have discussion on the topics where they could reply directly to the content pages themselves, whereas with a wiki you have to converse about the content over a different medium. Unfortunately people don't (rarely) discuss things here anymore.

So I could give up the fight to continue conversations here and turn the site into a wiki and have you and/or others update the content (I simply don't have the time for that type of commitment right now, as far as the content goes). Or you can develop your site and I can take this site down. Either way though, it doesn't solve the problem of problems being solved, and information being shared on the facebook groups, that doesn't end up somewhere that people can find it in the future.

Honestly I never planned on competing with anyone, I never added the information directly to the forums here cause in my opinion Forums are for two things: chatting and tech support. A long tutorial or guide can be better written in just about *any* format available. Don't get me wrong, I massively appreciate everything you do here syntax, without this site the community probably would have shattered years ago. But that bring me back to my original point, despite the non-sense between the Forums and FB, I have always seen this site as the hub of the community. Where you come to meet others who play MMUD, find some new boards, maybe ask some questions you couldn't find the answer to elsewhere. I don't know, maybe I am alone in this. Information for MMUD/WG has always been scattered everywhere. Not to mention a lot of the game knowledge people search for the most is information that, if your a newbie, you don't realize has to be somewhat hand-tailored to what you are playing (scripting, looking at you) and "general" information would not be much good. (my Scripting page is the single most viewed page)

As far as updating and multiple sources of information, sorry but I strongly don't agree with this. With the internet now a days a request like that, unless you have the man-power and financial reasources to snuff out or buy up every other source of information, is just going to be impossible and quite frankly a fruitless endeavor. You cannot control information like that in this day and age. If I did not do it, someone else would have (sure maybe in another language). Plus, the more people looking into a topic, the better quality of information you will get out of it. It's not like I am hiding away in a bunker with all my info saying "HAHA FOOLS".

On the last topic though, I would say a Wiki would be a great addition to the Forums. But a Wiki is not a chat channel, it is information and a discussion of information posted (which is vastly different). As stated in the previous post, most likely I do not have time to work on something like this full-time or even part-time. Continuation would be very slow, but if you were to pull the switch, I would help (however little).

As far as the Facebook front goes, I will never have anything to do with that site. I used it once upon a time for family reason but never again. If they want to store all their information somewhere where the moment it comes off your fingers some multi-national corporation owns it, fine by me. Their loss.

What we have then, is a technological problem. The reason everyone uses the Facebook group is because it is convenient for them, it is in the palm of their hand all day long. Can that be said about the Forums? And Tapatalk, which is a horrendous piece of software that is by ABSOLUTELY no means user-friendly or even newbie-friendly, is not a solution. This is the problem I believe, a technical one. If the forum could somehow be easily in the palm of everyone's hand it would be easier to re-convert everyone. Sadly for almost every other industry I interact with Forums have gone by the way-side (except for Technical Support). People are either using social media, things like slack or matrix, or some other newer tech. It is very similar to going on IRC in this day and age, it just is not what it used to be.

Kyau wrote:Honestly I never planned on competing with anyone

Whether or not you planned to, a second something of anything that provides the same anything, is a competing something

Kyau wrote:cause in my opinion Forums are for two things: chatting and tech support. A long tutorial or guide can be better written in just about *any* format available.

As I mentioned, I agree. And unfortunately, both the chatting and the tech support mostly happen on Facebook.

Kyau wrote:I have always seen this site as the hub of the community. Where you come to meet others who play MMUD, find some new boards, maybe ask some questions you couldn't find the answer to elsewhere.

Since the demise of ForumsHQ.com, that's what I have been trying to achieve. Then facebook happened.

Kyau wrote:You cannot control information like that in this day and age.

I am obviously failing in my expression of my views on this topic. And because of that fail must be why you and others can make comments like this. And why some keep bashing me like I'm being selfish, somehow. Let me try to make myself very clear once again...

I want there... I desire there, to be a place, a one stop-shop, where the best information can be found. Not for me. For the community. I don't care if that is here, facebook, your site, or somewhere else. Let me say that again, I do not care if that place is mudinfo.net or not. That's why I said you could continue to grow your site and I'll take this down. I just want there to be somewhere that people can go to find the best possible information. They shouldn't have to go to facebook and ask for the 18th thousandth time, "how do I setup Megamud on Windows 10?" Hint: there is a post here which tells you exactly how to do it-- but on a wiki or another format, perhaps it would be easier to find. I am not trying to "control" the information for myself. I am trying to "funnel" the information, for the sake of the community.

It's good to have information in multiple places for redundancy, in case one goes offline, like everything we lost from ForumsHQ. But if those resources aren't completely redundant, then it's no longer a positive and more of a negative (in my opinion) because information is still lost when one disappears, people are then forced to check multiple sources when information is not found, or even worse, maybe the information is found on one place but it's wrong and/or there is better information in another place. There's then a high likelyhood that user won't even see it and will proceed with bad information (To go back to my example earlier-- like people on Facebook telling people they have to install megamud to the root of their C drives to get it to work, which that in of itself is incomplete information).

It's good to have information in multiple places for redundancy, in case one goes offline, like everything we lost from ForumsHQ.

This was one of my incentives for doing what I did, I hate going back to sites years late to find out my bookmark leads to a dead end.

You cannot control information like that in this day and age.

Sorry, this came out completely wrong, what I mean was one cannot control what and where people are going to consume their information. I meant no disrespect.

They shouldn't have to go to facebook and ask for the 18th thousandth time

This is precisely why a lot of corporations HR departments have moved off Facebook and onto things like Slack. It keeps a full detailed record of all previous conversations that you can search through. (Not that I would recommend this for our needs though)

I do not care if that place is mudinfo.net or not. That's why I said you could continue to grow your site and I'll take this down.

I share your views here as well. However, while my site is not going anywhere any time soon, I did not in any way mean this in a way to make you even think of taking this site down. I was never trying to create someplace that fostered community, More of somewhere the community linked to in discussions from time to time. I do understand what you said about whether I wanted to or not though...

Hey Kyau.

I used to play on VOID and it was a good time. Enjoyed chatting a bit.

Really liked your Wiki, nice layout. Will check out the DB later when it's not blocked at work, yay.