New wiki and forum for discussion of MUD standards

A wiki and forum have been set up at a new domain: mudstandards.org

(Edit: April 2015) Warning: Domain name abandoned. That site is now an adult products shop.

Currently various client and server developers are contributing ideas to the forum. In particular, various people from IRE, myself (MUSHclient), Zugg (cMUD), the Mudlet developers, as well as Lasher from Aardwolf.

The forum is currently inviting people with experience in coding MUD clients or servers to join the forum and contribute to the discussion.

More details are in the post from Jeremy Saunders here:

http://www.topmudsites.com/forums/mud-coding/6006-mudstandards-org.html

At present membership is by invitation only. If you want to join, register for the forum and send Jeremy an email at jeremy@mudstandards.org explaining who you are.

This forum is not intended for low-level details like "how do I get the MUD to compile" but rather to discuss present and future standards for MUD development. For example, a discussion is starting up about the ATCP protocol, which IRE have now released as an open format, so other MUDs can use it as well.

Sounds like an interesting project -- let's hope some good stuff comes out of it. :) Out of curiosity, why is membership currently by invitation only? I would completely understand that the "decision making committee" be by invitation, but limiting simple participation seems contrary to several of the stated goals.

Definitely looks really, really interesting.

David, based on Jeremy's post I assume there will be a public discussion section at some point... This is a new endeavor, I'm sure things need to start moving, get stabilized. I completely understand why they'd want to keep the wiki protected, though.

I too think this is very interesting, but I also agree with David. Why make it invitation only? Keep the wiki protected, that is fine. However, it seems to me that discussion could freely occur on the forums, or at the very least make them viewable to the public.

Well this is a hot topic! It is also being raised on the mudstandards.org forum itself.

The initial thinking was that the sort of standards they are planning to develop are fairly technical (like MCCP, MSP) and that without a grounding in client or server development you wouldn't really be able to contribute much. Correct me if I am wrong.

I couldn't see the ordinary player wanting to get bogged down in stuff like "should we use Lua or JSON?" or "what is the maximum practical message size?" and the ones that would be interested would probably be quickly accepted into the forum.

But perhaps it would be self-selecting anyway, only interested parties would join, so why make it harder for them?

There has been a recent post of the mudstandards.org forum that making membership closed will make it look like some sort of commercial cabal. That was certainly never my intention. As you know MUSHclient and Mudlet are both open source.

What do you think? Would read-only membership be satisfactory? Or do you think that anyone interested enough to join, should be able to?

[EDIT] (April 2015) Warning: Domain name abandoned. That site is now an adult products shop.

I was thinking this very thing just now. I can be perfectly tolerant of some secrecy for now, considering it's a brand new endeavor, but in the long run I think a public section is a must

I should point out too that Zugg's developers forums are invitation-only as well.

Aren't his forums more specific to his clients, though? I don't honestly know, I don't keep track of zMUD/CMUD stuff. It seems like the "MUD Standards" group is a bit bigger than that, anyways, given the kind of people who are involved from the start.

I don't really see the point to secrecy when the point is to make open standards. (!!) I see the point in reducing noise, certainly, but not secrecy per se. Making it invitation-only gives it this somewhat odd 'exclusive club' feeling to me.

While I agree that clearly you couldn't contribute much to a technical discussion unless you had a technical background, I don't think people without a technical background would even be interested in such a discussion: hence why, as you said, it would be fairly self-selection.

Zugg's forums are different for several reasons, one of which is that it's a commercial enterprise, and as a related point it's not a place to develop open standards.

I don't think there would be a huge number of people pining to sign up, so I don't see much harm in allowing forum registration to those people actually interested. As you said, it would be self-selective.

I think for a project like this you might as well as seek everyone interested because that group is likely to be small anyway. Thus, making it easy to sign up would encourage discussion; on the other hand, if it were invitation only a lot of people who might be interested may not bother pursuing it further.

We seem to have reached agreement at this point for the forum to be read-only for everyone, and a writable "general" section. Once that is done (sometime today perhaps) you could always post your views about everything being writable (if you have such views) in the General section.

Excellent! Thanks for keeping us updated.

Well, I was going to chime up about this too, but I think everything I was going to say has been said. For the record, count me as another vote for the notion that it'd be mostly self-selective because of the topic matter but that I fully understand the motivation for invitation only. Thank you (for a second time) for keeping us updated on this, it does sound like a very interesting topic and I'll be eagerly watching to se what it turns into.

This sounds like a great idea to me. One place to have all of these different protocols available certainly helps when looking for information on how to implement them.

Is the site going to cover only things like MCCP/MXP/MSP or is it open to other things such as IMC2?

I presume anything relevant to MUDs would be welcome.