The port used (23) is the standard port used for all telnet (which MUDs are a very specialised form of).

Ssaliss:

The port used (23) is the standard port used for all telnet (which MUDs are a very specialised form of).

Ok. I'm sure I'm not the only person trying to connect who has no idea what you're talking about.

You are correct Riluna. While I am new to Lusternia I am not new to muds and frequently this is a common question.

In essence, it means that whatever you use to connect should have the correct port already in place.

You clearly have not used muldet which requests the port number and I believe mushclient does as well.

While we are on it so doe the client named genius.

Edit: Also what is the likely hood she would have looked if that field was already filled in?

Easy there. No need to get so punchy.

telnet is the name for a standardized way for one computer to access the command line of another computer. It has been around since the 1970s at least, maybe earlier, and was designed for sitting at one computer and getting to another as if you were there, back when computers all had command lines. It is still widely used in Unix systems.

Of course, you can set up a Unix system so that when you log in, instead of just getting a bare command prompt, you automatically run some program. That could be the top-level menu for your business's accounts payable system, for instance. That way, the accountants people don't even see the computer, they just see that they're logging into the Accounts Payable system.

Well, there's no reason you can't make it so you log straight into some game that lives on the system, too. That's how the first MUDs worked: you used the same software you were already using to connect to some server, and logged in, and bang, you were in a game. That way I could let you play my game on my server without also letting you do things like type commands on my computer. You could only go into the game and nothing else.

But a few problems showed up here. First, as computer security got common, firewalls often blocked access using telnet. For example, if you had your computer in your dorm room set up to run some game, people from outside the campus could get into it, and your college probably didn't like the vulnerability of people outside the university getting into computers inside it, so they'd block telnet. Another problem is that maybe I am running more than one thing on that computer: maybe I have two games running on it, plus I also need to be able to get to the command line myself to run the system.

Both problems are solved through the use of ports. By default, telnet always used port 23, which was assigned way back when to always be used for telnet, so that every computer could just connect to every other computer without anyone having to configure anything. (In the same way, your web browser always knows where to find the web server on a computer because it uses port 80, because port 80 was reserved for web services.) But suppose your university, sensibly, blocks port 23 to outside the campus. But they never blocked port 2000 because nothing even uses that. Bingo: you configure your server to use the non-standard port 2000, then tell your friends in the next town to configure their computers to connect to it, and suddenly you're past the firewall. And you can set up your multiple games on multiple ports, so your other game is on port 2001.

As MUDs got more popular, people stopped using the basic telnet built into their computers (odds are your computer has telnet built in even if you don't know about it) and started to use fancy clients like zMUD, which are really just a basic telnet client with some extra goodies thrown in like aliases, triggers, or a command prompt. As with the built-in telnet client, these MUD clients would typically default to port 23, but let you change it. However, MUDs, by their nature, were more likely to be off the default port, because they were a specialized use, and they were very often being run in an "unofficial" way (e.g., by someone who really wasn't supposed to be using that computer or network for that purpose), so they frequently were put onto other ports. Plus, people sometimes used other ports because even if they didn't have to contend with a firewall, their customers might, if they were connecting from work. Thus, the question that used to be one you didn't even have to ask (what port is it on?) most of the time, when using normal telnet, you end up having to ask so much of the time that some MUD clients apparently don't even have the 23 default in there anymore. (Which seems dumb to me, really. You might as well have a default in there. But that's how it is.)

Here endeth the lesson.

maka:
You clearly have not used muldet which requests the port number and I believe mushclient does as well.

While we are on it so doe the client named genius.

Edit: Also what is the likely hood she would have looked if that field was already filled in?

Mudlet has a pre-loaded Lusternia profile with the connection info already present.

MUSHclient doesn't. When I tried to make a world for Lusternia, it had a port number 4000 in it.

But even if some clients do have some sort of default to connect to it, do you agree that it may be a good idea to have the address readily available, on the website?

Ah so I it does! I just got used to it not having all of the games I play and making new logins. *shrugs*

Still agree with Riluna

Let artisans make fancy tinderboxes that live longer.

Aldani:

Let artisans make fancy tinderboxes that live longer.

Let bookbinders make sorcel'glass' scrolls to reshape tinderboxes!

Let tailors sew fancy tinderbox coverings!

New shiny stuff for jewellers: Medals. Costs a fair amount to make and are inscribable. Unenchantable, but permanent.

With the new warmth factor could we perhaps add some new effects to adjust warmth.

I see the Cat Spirit of Snow Valley and Grandmother Scorpion in the desert. Both might be good candidates for warmth adjusting totems.

It would be nice to have easy to read player descriptions. The clothes in a description could be organised by type so bodywear is first, and each section of the description split on multiple lines to make it easier to understand what someone looks like. Something like:

Brutus is a hunky taurian with shiny horns and flowing auburn hair.
He is wearing a striped loincloth and thigh high leather boots.
He is adorned with a chunky gold bracelet and a pretty silver ring.

It's a bit of a jumble currently and my brain switches of once it hits the mix of rings.

Add the time in PST to TIME, since people generally gives the time of events in PST instead of GMT. Or, use the time in GMT for events.

A further BUG command to clear the resolved ones from your LISTBUGS. For I am lazy and have no desire to poke at individual ID numbers, I wish for a DELBUG option.