Happy New Year everyone! We hope everyone had a good 2007 and that your 2008 is even better.

Many volunteers from the TMC forums have come together and are helping me to build a system that will allow the mud listings to be confirmed for accuracy or corrected when necessary. We thank these volunteers for helping to cleanup the listings and we will add their contact info to the site's credits page soon.

We have added two new listing options for mud admins to add to their listings (if applicable):

1. Player Crafting System - Players can craft items either for their use, for uses within the mud or for selling to other players or merchants.
2. Player-Run Cities - Players can construct and run cities

TMC members can now rate discussions threads from 1 to 5 stars, 1 star indicating that you feel the thread is a meaningless pile of trash, 5 stars indicating you feel the thread is very useful. This system is just going in today (12-6-07) and is considered beta, please report bugs to Icculus as you find them. In the very near future members will be able to set their discussion ratings threshold which will allow you to filter threads based on a minimum average rating based on a minimum number of submitted ratings of your choosing. Ex. You will be able to tell the discussion software to ignore any threads rated 1 star averaged from 10+ member ratings. This will be strictly optional and by default you will see all threads regardless of their rating unless you set a threshold. NOTE: The ratings info/form are only implemented right now in the new thread format, you will not see this stuff yet in the old thread format.

In an effort to consolidate the numerous domains that point to this website we are now using mod_rewrite to force redirects from mudconnector.com and mudconnector.net to www.mudconnect.com. The main implication of this is that those of you who frequently use mudconnector.com or .org instead of mudconnect.com will likely need to re-login to set a new cookie at mudconnect.com. Once logged-in you should not need to repeat this process unless you specifically logout.

You can now display a TMC vote button on your website which displays your mud's TMC rank, feel free to copy and paste the example html below and substitute 'YOUR_MUD_NAME' for the actual name of your mud.

<a href="http://www.mudconnect.com/cgi-bin/vote_rank.cgi?mud=YOUR+MUD+NAME"> <img border="0" src="http://www.mudconnect.com/cgi-bin/get_rank_button.cgi?mud=YOUR+MUD+NAME" alt="Vote for Our Mud on TMC!"></a>

Some of you may be experiencing problems with playing muds with computers running Windows Vista, the following explanation was found on the zuggsoft.com forums along with the suggested fix.

Windows Vista enables something called AutoTuning by default which earlier windows versions had disabled, to bypass this problem login to your computer as an Administrator and open a command shell (Start -> Run -> type cmd ) and enter this text and then hit return:

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable

We are proud to announce the launch of the first Social Network devoted to mudders, tentatively being called TMCnet. The Mud Connector Social Network offers a suite of features designed to help bring the mud community closer together, including:

• Member profiles - simplifies the process of finding other mudders with similar interests
• Image Galleries - Share your images with other Social Network members.
• Instant Messaging - Send and receive IMs with other members, as well as with mudders connected to the IMC network
• Mail - Send and receive TMCnet mail to/from other members
• Friendships - two-way friendships allow otherwise private content to be shared among members
• Groups - create your own private, semi-private or public groups and invite other members to join in targetted discussions
• Journals - post entries in your personal or group's journal for other members to read and optionally comment on
• Events Engine - create calendar events for others to read about and take part in

We welcome you to come and activate your TMC member account ( for members 14 years of age and older ) and join us on TMCnet.

Today (03/12/2006) TMC will be launching our new (read: revised) stats and ranking system, the coming changes will reflect many of the suggestions from our users in a recent discussion board thread. A quick summary of the changes follows:

• The 3-vote system is being replaced by a single vote system, telnet and homepage clicks will no longer count towards a mud's tmc ranking.
  
• The visual verification system is being removed, we will evaluate if it needs to be restored over time.
  
• Vote and Rank data will be reset twice monthly

We hope the new ranking system shows to be an improvement.

Three new RSS feeds have been added, allowing our users to subscribe to receive discussion board summaries, new mudlist additions and new tmc mud reviews.

There has been alot of feedback regarding tmc member login problems, which I believe are caused by the way certain browsers handle framed content and document caching. I made some changes to the login system today which I hope will help with this problem.

We have wiped the stats and ranking tables once again after finding evidence of some open-proxy usage in our logs. We have added code to help restrict the use of known open proxies and prevent votes from being counted from those servers. We are logging all votes now and will periodically check votes that were tallied for open proxies, muds found to be using votes issued from open proxy servers will have their stats wiped and be suspended from the rankings system (this is the only warning you will get).

Many of you have written to me expressing concern about the integrity of the rankings system. Despite many attempts to discover the source of the _holes_ and fix them I have thrown my hands up and have rewritten the voting system to hopefully solve these issues. The new voting procedure involves matching an image-embedded character code generated on-the-fly as an extra layer of confirmation before a vote may be considered valid and applied to a muds' stats. The mud rankings and tmc stats have been wiped so we can start fresh and examine how the new system behaves. As always please report any suspected abuse to the TMC Admin.

This is a change that has been planned and delayed and replanned and pushed back for years now. Internally it is massive, a complete reworking of our submission and mud listings management system; To the mud adminstrators that have been stuck with our old, klunky, poorly designed and way out of date submissions system the new version should seem a world of difference. Don't take my word for it, go check it out:
--> [TMC Mud Listing Submissions] <--

For quite a few years our board system has remained pretty much as it was originally created (1995 or so) while newer and flashier message boards have appeared on the scene. I have been hesitant to make such drastic changes to avoid straying far from stock version of the software and because I knew it would be a painful process. So after years of fielding your comments requesting a better message board structure I finally gave in and went to work on it, and today the beta version is available to TMC's members.

For some information about the changes you can read my post in the general board. I welcome your comments, suggestions for further improvements and any bug reports that you can provide.

The addition of member Avatars and signatures effects both the new version of the message boards as well as the old, to choose an Avatar and set your signature please head to the member settings panel.

TMC will also be providing articles written by a handful of regular contributors, including an upcoming article on Building Tips and Tricks. We will also be posting articles submitted by TMC users. If you have an idea for an upcoming article and want to get your voice heard send us an email to articles@mudconnect.com

• Added a complete thread history to each post's display, showing you exactly where you are in the thread and providing links to all posts.
• Modified the reply subject so the 'RE:' is only prepended if it isn't there already.
• Added the ability for members to edit their discussion posts. Well, somewhat, you can't really change your original post but can add a comment to clarify if something didn't come out right in your post.
• Added a Reply Tracker to provide a single location to display recent replies made to your discussion posts.

1. You can now specify a mud creation date filter and have search results filter our either muds created before the date, after the date or show muds created in the specified year.
2. We have added result sorting, you can now sort results based on mud name (default), codebase, or last update date.

Also, we have added a Password Reminder to the update form as well, be sure to hit the update panel and set your password reminder, in case you ever forget your TMC password.

If you are an avid RPer please give it a try!