[MUD-Dev] Re: Mud websites

[Chris Gray]

[J C Lawrence:]

 >I was so bold as to ask several users of Utne's web boards.  Two also
 >reported them as painful to use, but justified by the friends and
 >contacts they'd made there.  Four had never used anything else and
 >considered email to be "difficult and confusing".

I think we are in a time of transition, from the basic text interface
to something with more capabilities. I can only hope the tool builders
keep the poor user firmly in mind, however. There is a discussion
going on in 'comp.arch' (computer architecture) right now about whether
news articles should be in HTML or not. I tried newsreading in
Netscape for a while (very spammy groups, but with lots of pictures),
and found it very dissatisfying - automatic stuff just about drove
me crazy - I got real tired of clicking 'cancel' on the requests about
sending email to commercial sites! I'll stick to 'gnus' inside Gnu
emacs, where everything works with a keystroke. Similarly, I'll stick
to a simple text-only email interface that I can understand, and which
presents the text in a font and colours that *I* have chosen for
readability.

This same issue is present for bulletin boards in MUDs - do you want
to force the reader to read in a format that they haven't chosen? As a
user, I'd say "please don't".

--
Chris Gray     cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA