Initially I wanted to do this for personal use only but I figured it would be unfair not to share: I have imported the whole muddev archive into a phpbb forum, searchable and all, and put it up at: http://muddev.wishes.net
Have fun.

Thanks for the info, I was curious.

On a side note, Jesus Christ, I had no idea how big these archives were. I’m intent to read through the entire archive in search of gems, but it’s probably going to take me until the end of the year (30,000 posts / 100 posts a day = 300 days + a few for slacking off) to actually get through the whole thing.

Still, those who don’t know history..

I think a few things combined to kill MUD-Dev. More and more developers went under NDA and were being taken from the MUD ranks into corporate MMOs. This watered down what could be discussed in the form of examples and as such there was a whole lot of self moderation. When it was just EQ, UO and AC it wasn’t that bad but as soon as the other two dozen projects after the initial three were announced, the list seemed to start downhill. The list also became more public knowledge which meant fans read the lists looking for insider information reinforcing the idea of self moderation.

I think JCL just got tired of the maintenance but I don’t know that first hand. I know that the servers had some hardware trouble and perhaps some of it was not fully replaced in time to keep MUD-Dev rocking but there was an extended outage from a hardware/software/moderation standpoint that left the list inactive for around a month or so.

People on the list moved on to Blogs. Blogs are much more specialized and as the list became more popular, each user had to weed through topics that did not interest them, much in the way you filter spam from your email. Blogs and RSS feeds allowed users of MUD-Dev to automate some of the filtering. The side effect of that was that every so often MUD-Dev users would get into threads they wouldn’t actually seek out and bring new opinion into those threads. I fear that in the blog world, the cross pollenation(sp?) of ideas isn’t as efficient.

Lastly, there was an effort to revive the list early last year. I know I subscribed to it but saw next to no traffic on the list. All that said, I am glad the archives from that list are being saved. They are important and you’ld be amazed at how many of “today’s MMO issues” were hashed and rehashed on the list. Nothing we see in MMOs is really new if you look back on those archives. The MUD world has wrestled with all the problems the MMO world has save scale. That archive is a good resource for any MMO designer.

Oh, wow! Thanks for putting this up! I’d feared all that stuff was lost for good.

Is there any word on how JCL is doing? Last I’d heard, he was working at Maxtor.

I actually scraped the site soon before it went down and indexed it with a couple of scripts. I’d be glad to donate my time to bringing it back up. It’s an invaluable resource, especially with keyword searches.