[MUD-Dev] Re: META: What are you looking for in this list?

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 02:45 PM 9/23/98 -0700, I personally witnessed J C Lawrence jumping up
to say:
>
>Knowing a little of the background data of our subscriber list, the
>membership appear to be almost evenly spread between the
>DIKU/LP/Tiny-* camps.  

I'm hard-pressed to put myself on either the Diku side or the Tiny side. I
tend to find that Tinys are more to my liking for protracted play, but
there's nothing like a twenty-minute rampage through some area of a Diku
variant. :)

>MUD-Dev is not meant to be an ivory tower where only the gurus and
>initiates discuss weighty matters in hushed tones of extreme
>reverence.

*blink* Um... okay. ;>

Seriously, the requirement of "HIGH SIGNAL" makes it look like it is,
indeed, meant to be at least *something* of an ivory tower. Not necessarily
as high as you depict here, but when I first showed up on this list I was
hesitant to bring up a lot of topics because I thought they might be viewed
as "noise". I'm on a developers' list which considers UI discussions
"noise", and I personally think UI concerns are pretty central to the
development process. Unfortunately, only two list members agree with me on
that, and a dozen or so *violently* disagree. 

So basically what I'm saying here is, while "high-signal" means "on-topic",
different people think the topic means different things. I would tend to
think that this list is intended for "issues of interest to MUD
developers", which includes a lot of peripheral fields that aren't
necessarily applicable but are certainly interesting -- like the posts we
see on online communities and the psychology of internet relationships. On
the other hand, it could be "issues of interest in MUD development", which
would include *other* peripheral issues, like 3D rendering techniques and
client/server API definitions. And then there is the possibility of the
topic being "issues primarily and specifically of interest in MUD server
construction", which would restrict the discussion to mostly language and
network protocol concerns. 

What I think we *really* need is a clearly worded topic. ;)

>We all start somewhere.  We were all helped along the line somewhere.

Words to live by. Once upon a time, each and every one of us said something
along the lines of "What the hell is a MUD?" ;)


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Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com>   | "I'm not sorry or 
Darklock Communications <http://www.darklock.com/> |  ashamed of who I 
PGP Key AD21EE50 at <http://pgp5.ai.mit.edu/~bal/> |  really am."      
FREE KEVIN MITNICK! <http://www.kevinmitnick.com/> |  - Charles Manson