Raph’s Website » Full MUD-Dev archive for download

Full MUD-Dev archive for download

February 2nd, 2007 (Visited 11202 times) Tags:

Nick Koranda kindly provided the MUD-Dev2 list with a full copy of the original MUD-Dev mailing list archive — 31,406 messages, 62 megabytes as a zip.

Edit: it occurs to me that likely there are many readers who do not know why this matters. MUD-Dev was the principal location of high-level technical and design discussion for all forms of online world design — which was, of course mostly MUDs, but folks from Meridian 59, UO, Dark Sun Online, The Realm, EverQuest, and many of the other graphical worlds participated as well. Many of the snippets on the site come from there, and combing through these very archives was the source of the original Laws of Online World Design. There’s a lot of accumulated wisdom there.

You can get it from me here: Compleat MUD-Dev archive (62MB zip)

Or from Nick at: http://mkhh.net/MUD-Archive.zip

Edit: also mirrored now here.

For giggles, here’s the first, last, and median messages:

Welcome to the mud mailing list!

If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list,
you can send mail to “majordomo” with the following command
in the body of your email message:

unsubscribe mud coder@ibm.net

Here’s the general information for the list you’ve
subscribed to, in case you don’t already have it:

[Last updated on: Thu Aug 22 22:50:22 1996]
This list is meant for the discussion of MUD servers.

That’s all the info I can come up with for now.

Enjoy the list!

That sent, of course, by the redoubtable J. C. Lawrence. He has told me that in fact, the list had existed for 2 years by that point, starting in 2004 s “Wout’s mailing list” or some such. JCL supposedly had the messages from those two years somewhere on a hard drive, and he always intended to get them up into the main archive…

The median message, displaying the broad range of topics covered (yes, this message had a design point!):

“Philip Loguinov, Draymoor” said:

> Does anyone know about how far an average person can wak in a day?

~25 miles (not a couch potato, mind)

> How about forced march?

~45 miles

How about a horse?

No clue.

–
nathan.yospe@isearch.com Born In Don’t mind me, I’m just insane
New home page TBA The Year of there’s someone else here,
Other contact info the Tiger in my brain.
available by request Riding it Forever After -wibble-

And finally,

> My guess would be that the developers who would be the most
> in-the-know are working on commercial products and are
> contractually limited in how much they can talk about
> implementation details?

Nah, we’re just all working hard trying to hit Christmas product
launch dates. =)

–d
(Lead Designer, Shadowbane: Throne of Oblivion)

That would be Damion, of course, sending the last message.

Nick says that if anyone get get it back into a nice structure (it uses to be marked up in a DB with threads, sortable by author and date, and so on) he’ll host it on the MUD-Dev2 website.

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Boing Boing: February 2007 wrote on March 1st, 2007 at 12:46 pm:

[...] Seminal virtual world designer mailing list archive Raph Koster has just uploaded the full, 62MB, 31,406-message archive of the seminal MUD-DEV list, the Ur-list where virtual world designers all started out, laying the groundwork for all the MMORPGs (like Second Life and World of Warcraft): [I]it occurs to me that likely there are many readers who do not know why this matters. MUD-Dev was the principal location of high-level technical and design discussion for all forms of online world design — which was, of course mostly MUDs, but folks from Meridian 59, UO, Dark Sun Online, The Realm, EverQuest, and many of the other graphical worlds participated as well. Many of the snippets on the site come from there, and combing through these very archives was the source of the original Laws of Online World Design. There’s a lot of accumulated wisdom there. Link [...]

Full MUD-DEV Archive for Download - MyDreamRPG Community wrote on March 2nd, 2007 at 9:39 pm:

[...] is around 62MB in size. We hope you learn from and enjoy this as we did. Original Download Page: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/02/02…-for-download/ If you have any objections to this mirror please e-mail: sales [ at ] mydreamrpg [ dot ] [...]

MUDDev Archive :: View topic - This forum wrote on March 3rd, 2007 at 1:34 am:

[...] Feel free to post your comments/problems in the General forum. The archive was obtained from: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/02/02/full-mud-dev-archive-for-download/ Enjoy, [...]

Boing Boing: Seminal virtual world designer mailing list archive wrote on March 26th, 2007 at 11:24 am:

Boing Boing: January 28, 2007 - February 3, 2007 Archives wrote on August 29th, 2007 at 6:21 am:

[...] Seminal virtual world designer mailing list archive Posted by Cory Doctorow, February 2, 2007 10:48 AM | # | Discuss (0) Raph Koster has just uploaded the full, 62MB, 31,406-message archive of the seminal MUD-DEV list, the Ur-list where virtual world designers all started out, laying the groundwork for all the MMORPGs (like Second Life and World of Warcraft): [I]it occurs to me that likely there are many readers who do not know why this matters. MUD-Dev was the principal location of high-level technical and design discussion for all forms of online world design — which was, of course mostly MUDs, but folks from Meridian 59, UO, Dark Sun Online, The Realm, EverQuest, and many of the other graphical worlds participated as well. Many of the snippets on the site come from there, and combing through these very archives was the source of the original Laws of Online World Design. There’s a lot of accumulated wisdom there. Link [...]

Slashdot | The Zen of Online Game Design wrote on September 7th, 2007 at 10:34 am:

[...] Schubert and others contributed to the original list, the archives of which are available from Raph Koster’s site [raphkoster.com]The archives cover a lot of interesting ideas that largely have yet to find their [...]

StumbleUpon » Your page is now on StumbleUpon! wrote on December 1st, 2007 at 8:48 pm:

[...] Your page is on StumbleUpon [...]

Rufus said on February 2nd, 2007 at 11:11 am:

Has anyone been able to contact JCL and find out what’s up?

It’s like a huge game of digital ‘where’s waldo’ — he just sorta vanished.

Raph said on February 2nd, 2007 at 11:45 am:

I saw JCL and visited with him year before last when we drove up the coast for the summer holiday… I’ve left messages on his phone since then but haven’t heard back. A few of the other folks from the list (like Jon Leonard) have supposedly actually heard from him.

Daniel Lowe said on February 2nd, 2007 at 12:10 pm:

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.

Dreamer said on February 2nd, 2007 at 3:12 pm:

We’re planning to index this and make it fully searchable, and in the meantime we are also going to mirror the download so it don’t eat up all your bandwidth.
The mirror is located at http://www.mydreamrpg.com/community/showthread.php?p=8046

Thank you very much for this collection.

Zak said on February 2nd, 2007 at 7:50 pm:

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.

VPellen said on February 2nd, 2007 at 9:05 pm:

Ahh, brilliant.. this is just what I’ve been looking for. I came to MUD-Dev far too late in the game, and by the time the relevance of the archives actually hit me, they’d all disappeared. This is immensely useful.

It’s too bad that MUD-Dev caved. What actually happened to it, anyway?

Kressilac said on February 2nd, 2007 at 11:14 pm:

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.

Psychochild said on February 4th, 2007 at 1:41 am:

As I understand it, the hardware on kanga.nu died a hideous death. JCL always had plans for upgrading the system, but they never came to fruition. I think he wanted to take the opportunity to do some of the big plans he had, but that annoying “real life” thing kept him too busy. As happens with many ambitious projects, it just slipped by the wayside.

To be honest, I hadn’t been reading MUD-Dev in a while. It was still a pretty good resource, but I’ve found blogs have replaced the really valuable content. Toward the end I couldn’t keep up with the flood and would just occasionally read posts by people I knew.

But, nice to see the archives are available, nonetheless.

VPellen said on February 4th, 2007 at 3:29 am:

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..

Michael Chui said on February 4th, 2007 at 3:30 am:

Same here; I have a backlog of somewhere from a hundred to a thousand messages on a thread that was interesting to me; as of right now, the old MUD-Dev stuff was the reason my inbox broke 1000 unread.

One of the contributing factors, in my opinion, was the rise of Terra Nova. I resisted moving over for a while, but I eventually did. And around the same time, the blogosphere just took over.

I mirrored it, too, since my website is effectively unused at the moment: http://www.aqualgidus.org/MUD-Archive.zip

Int said on February 7th, 2007 at 9:36 am:

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.