[MUD-Dev] Re: In game bulletin boards vs. Web based.

[Holly Sommer]

On Wed, 10 Jun 1998, Adam Wiggins wrote:

> remember that although all of us here might be playing
> from superduper hi-res workstations where we can open telnet and a web
> browser at the same time, many (most?) mudders play from those
> amber VT-100 terminals at their school.

You're kidding, right? This might have been true 5 years ago, but you'd 
be hard-pressed to even find a dummy terminal in a garage sale anymore. 
Schools are providing PCs in some cases, and the machines in labs are 
Pentiums, for the most part. The last time I even SAW a VT-100 being used 
in a classroom was in 1991. MUDders are a bit more modern than that, overall.

As for boards... establish a content policy, and keep up with it. Write a 
CGI which can create web pages on the fly, all formatted nicely, from the 
boards text files, and set up some means of being able to re-read boards 
after the server boots, in case someone wants to post to the board from 
outside the game. Of course, this would require you to check who can post 
to the boards (level requirements, if it's an actual MUDder, or if it's 
just a web surfer who's never played the game, etc.)

My take is that information generated within the game *should* exist 
within the game. Add it outside also, if you want, but don't relocate it 
to outside the game. This means more places that people have to check, 
just to keep up, which is simply "busy work."

-Holly