10 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 1st comment:
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The recent drama surrounding TMC has prompted me to start practicing what I've been preaching for a while. Namely, that we need a modern gateway site with a solid web-based client that will lower the bar for new players. And it would appear that we also need a good forum site for existing mudders (even if TMC does come back).

Introducing http://www.mudportal.com.

The site forum is online (if you can help test them as a user, please go ahead and register). A basic Flash-free web app is also up. As a sneak preview of what I'd like the homepage to look like, I featured a few MUDs that I lifted from the sigs of the most active admins here and on TMS.

My primary focus is going to be improving the web app (until it blows all desktop apps out of the water ;) and tying it with the community profiles (so people can save preferences, take a glimpse at other people's gaming activities, etc.). If other people are interested in helping with other aspects of the site, rest assured that there *are* vacant posts at this point ;) The back end is Joomla CMS on LAMP.

Question:
Does anyone know of a good dynamic MUD list, preferably served as XML or JSON? If there is one, I won't need to build a local MUD list for a while, which means I can make more progress on the web app.
10 Aug, 2013, Lyanic wrote in the 2nd comment:
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The site looks good at first glance. I signed up for an account (awaiting approval). I did notice that it hangs forever on registration, as well as confirming the account via the e-mailed link. I'm not sure if that's due to some temporary issue with hosting resources, or if it's just me.

As you know, creating a decent looking site is the easy part. Getting sufficient content and users is the hard part. Did you have a strategy in mind?

I might be interested in helping in some capacity.
10 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
Lyanic said:
The site looks good at first glance. I signed up for an account (awaiting approval). I did notice that it hangs forever on registration, as well as confirming the account via the e-mailed link. I'm not sure if that's due to some temporary issue with hosting resources, or if it's just me.


I activated your user and removed the need for admin approvals going forward.

Lyanic said:
As you know, creating a decent looking site is the easy part. Getting sufficient content and users is the hard part. Did you have a strategy in mind?


Yes, the easy part took about a day, and is almost over.

I shared some of my strategy. My focus will be on the web app and on making it really easy for folks to discover mudding via the site, or for vets to switch to mudding via the site when they are on the move. I'm not going to need a lot of content for that, just some really sharp coding and solid UI design with pitch-perfect contextual help for newbies.

In the longer run, the web app can gain advanced features. It has been possible for a while now to build something like Mudlet that is entirely a web app, so why not give it a shot.

In the meantime, I hope the forums and the community will grow organically around the app. There's already a lot of power under the hood in terms of social networking/gaming that goes well beyond what TMC was ever capable of.

Lyanic said:
I might be interested in helping in some capacity.


Cool. Feedback is nice, but help is awesome!
10 Aug, 2013, Tijer wrote in the 4th comment:
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just signed up myself.. and its taking an absolute age…. to register!
10 Aug, 2013, Lyanic wrote in the 5th comment:
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Ok, so the focus is more on a killer app (the client) than creating a site dependent on user generated content like most of the existing MUD fora. What's the initial marketing strategy for building a user base?

Tijer said:
just signed up myself.. and its taking an absolute age…. to register!

Yeah. It was the same for me - watching the page load for 2-3 minutes.
10 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
Lyanic said:
Ok, so the focus is more on a killer app (the client) than creating a site dependent on user generated content like most of the existing MUD fora. What's the initial marketing strategy for building a user base?


For me, that would be the main challenge. If someone else wants to take ownership of the forum and community features of the site, I'm down for that.

Lyanic said:
Tijer said:
just signed up myself.. and its taking an absolute age…. to register!

Yeah. It was the same for me - watching the page load for 2-3 minutes.


My web server is currently using an external proxy to send mail, which is why it's so slow. Will fix before too long.
10 Aug, 2013, Ssolvarain wrote in the 7th comment:
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Site looks good.

The client is clunky, though. Not a fan of it.
10 Aug, 2013, Scandum wrote in the 8th comment:
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plamzi said:
Question:
Does anyone know of a good dynamic MUD list, preferably served as XML or JSON? If there is one, I won't need to build a local MUD list for a while, which means I can make more progress on the web app.

I can provide a MSSP MUD list in JSON for 110 MUDs.

One thing I think was interesting that TMC did was to provide some really basic questions and suggest a MUD. Something that can be done fairly accurately with MSSP:

1. PLAYERS (determining the average may be more work)
2. LANGUAGE (English, German, etc)
3. GENRE (Adult, Fantasy, Historical, Horror, Modern, None, Science Fiction) (This list can be expanded but should probably stay under 10)
4. GAMEPLAY (Adventure, Educational, Hack and Slash, None, Player versus Player, Player versus Environment, Roleplaying, Simulation, Social, Strategy) (This list is pretty much complete)
5. SUBGENRE (A semi-official list of subgenres with some degree of consistency to cover most bases has yet to be developed) (multiple subgenres are allowed)
6. PAY FOR PERKS (1 or 0)

I still have a little bit of work to do on my crawler, but I could try to upload a mudlist to: tintin.sf.net/mssp/mudlist.json and update it every 11 hours (automated process) if anyone is interested. I can also provide a copy of the crawler (tt++ script) upon request if you want to run the crawler yourself.

Additions to MSSP can be discussed in the MSSP forum on MudBytes, I guess you would want a MEDIUM_ICON field with an URL to an image file.

My only problem is discovering new MUDs, I'd rather not depend on TMC.
10 Aug, 2013, Scandum wrote in the 9th comment:
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As a side note to the site description, MUDs were born in the 1980s and experienced a golden age in the 1990s during the early days of the Internet.
11 Aug, 2013, draxen wrote in the 10th comment:
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I love the design, the colors are lovely :)
It looks really modern and clean.
11 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 11th comment:
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Ssolvarain said:
The client is clunky, though. Not a fan of it.


Care to elaborate? Also, which browser?
11 Aug, 2013, Kelvin wrote in the 12th comment:
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Something I think most of the MUD sites fail at (yours included) is the front page isn't that helpful to someone not already familiar with MUDs. One thing you are doing better than most is that you have a brief description of what MUDs are. I think there should be a link there to a more in-depth introduction to MUDs. Convince the potential MUD player that this kind of game is worth their time. Show how your site will be valuable in their journey.

Also, re: the forum stats on the right sidebar: "Meh". I'd find something more useful to put there. That's just useless clutter/filler. The recent posts are much more useful, perhaps the stats could be removed in favor of letting the recent posts list extend further down.

Good start! This post was meant to be constructive, no flames intended.
11 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
Scandum said:
I still have a little bit of work to do on my crawler, but I could try to upload a mudlist to: tintin.sf.net/mssp/mudlist.json and update it every 11 hours (automated process) if anyone is interested.


I'm interested and will be thankful. I can scrape TMC, but I'd rather not.

Kelvin said:
I think there should be a link there to a more in-depth introduction to MUDs. Convince the potential MUD player that this kind of game is worth their time. Show how your site will be valuable in their journey.


The blurb will be hyper-linked soon enough. It's a question of balance though. I think people want to be able to see for themselves rather than read articles. I'm thinking of the quickest way to get them to fire up a game session into a very good game, with contextual help along the way so they'd know where and what to type, etc.

Kelvin said:
Also, re: the forum stats on the right sidebar: "Meh". I'd find something more useful to put there. That's just useless clutter/filler.


Of course–this is just filler for now. There will be better stuff there as soon as said stuff comes into being. The good thing about having a CMS is you can make those kinds of changes in a matter of seconds.
11 Aug, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
Scandum said:
I can provide a MSSP MUD list in JSON for 110 MUDs.


I'd actually find this quite handy, as an independant thing. IMHO, having MUD's being able to respond to MSSP queries and submit data via JSON would be another step forward.

Scandum said:
Additions to MSSP can be discussed in the MSSP forum on MudBytes, I guess you would want a MEDIUM_ICON field with an URL to an image file.


One thing that might be nice, a SCREENSHOT field, which could be filled with a URL of a rendering of the game's login screen, like this:

http://www.shadowlord.org/~bloodlines/pn...



That could either be populated via a crawler script (which is what my list does), or submitted directly by the MUD in question if they have one.
11 Aug, 2013, Idealiad wrote in the 15th comment:
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Nice work plamzi, looks like a good start. Are you aware of Orrin's http://mudgamers.com/ site? It was/is an attempt at what you have here. I don't think he advertised it very much though.
11 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 16th comment:
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Added a logged-in user menu with several options.

All registered users should now be able to submit reviews with images to a "Player Reviews" section.

Lyanic and Tijer should be able to post articles to the "News & Releases" section.

Again, testers appreciated.
11 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
Idealiad said:
Nice work plamzi, looks like a good start. Are you aware of Orrin's http://mudgamers.com/ site? It was/is an attempt at what you have here. I don't think he advertised it very much though.


Yes, I've been to the site a few times. Seems like it's been in inertia mode for years, unfortunately.

The major thing that will be different about mudportal.com is that it will be centered around the web app. It will be, just as the name suggests, a portal.

If I ever get interest from folks, I would like to raise funds from games that are being showcased and spend the money on PPC campaigns to drive some new players to the site. Not before I'm ready with a simple flow for total newbies, though.
11 Aug, 2013, Davion wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
Idealiad said:
Nice work plamzi, looks like a good start. Are you aware of Orrin's http://mudgamers.com/ site? It was/is an attempt at what you have here. I don't think he advertised it very much though.


I don't think the 2 are quite the same. This webapp is revolutionary. Plamzi is basically allowing all other MUDs to use the same webapp Bedlam uses. This app is amazing. This is a true modernization of the client. Wait till people can go beyond status bars. Really amazing Plamzi!
12 Aug, 2013, Kjwah wrote in the 19th comment:
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Have you thought about condensing the amount of external files you have to load for your theme? There's currently around 21 extra(not sure extra is the correct word, there's just a lot) css files being called on page load on top of eight different javascript files. :D
12 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
Kjwah said:
Have you thought about condensing the amount of external files you have to load for your theme? There's currently around 21 extra(not sure extra is the correct word, there's just a lot) css files being called on page load on top of eight different javascript files. :D


Using a CMS generally adds to the heaviness of site pages and means you have less control over exactly what scripts are loaded where. But, everything is used, everything is compressed, and of course cached after the first load.

Was the initial load too slow for you? TBH, I won't waste a second on optimizing until I hear from users that it affects their experience. And if there is any slowness, I doubt it would be due to any JS or CSS files–I'd look at media first.
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