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I'm the server administrator for three small pennmush communities. I've hosted them on a spare box for years now. One of the admins came to me after having lost his god username and password. How do I locate and recover these?

I'm an experienced system admin with little knowledge of pennmush's inner workings. I just run the darn thing. I would like to pick this up but the documentation is too geared to a unix user. I'm running the precompiled win32 binaries. Step by step instructions that don't assume knowledge of pennmush jargon would be greatly appreciated.

Pleased to report that I've just run my highest altitude MUSH. 35,000 feet, over Pennsylvania, thanks to American Airlines in-flight wifi, a win32 penn binary, and the power of reverse ssh tunneling.

Hi community.

I currently manage and pay for 4 websites and one mush. I think I probably pay about $400.00 a year for all of these services combined.

I like these services because someone else takes care of support, security, and patching. I don't like these services because I lose some flexibility.

In the last year or so, virtual private servers have gained some traction - it looks like a year on a vps server with 512 RAM would cost me $240.00 (and my time). I liked the idea of dedicated servers, but they are waaaay out of my price range.

Because at some level, all text-based games are related, I thought it appropriate to share this link with the community.

http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/a-note-on-the-word-zork/

From the article:

The lowdown on Zork’s name, inasmuch as a lowdown has been provided in print, was given by authors Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson in 1979 in the article “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game,” Computer 12:4, 51-59 (April 1979):

By reading this blog entry, you have temporarily given me control of your mind.

By continuing to read this post you agree to pay me $1,000,000.00.

I may have lost The Game, but I did it with STYLE.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get the text files [i.e.news/help] to format the way I want them to the first time, and or are there any editors out there that would do this?

There had been a spate of spam comments on c.p.o lately. As a temporary measure, I've turn off automatic comment approval, but that leaves me having to approve comments for long-time users, and slows down the experience for all of you.

So, improved strategy. A new role, "verified user", is now allowed to post comments without approval. You can become a verified user by choosing the "My account" link and the "apply for role table". I'll verify anyone who I can reasonably assure myself is an actual MUSHer and has been around the site for a while.

Dark Ages of Cybertron is in vast need of an experienced coder for various projects! Discordia, the director is even willing to pay if the coder is prompt and knows what they are doing. Drop a mail to Discordia or talk to her today.

Log available at http://walker.pennmush.org/logs/itbg_2009.html

After a hiatus last year, the Innovations and New Directions in Text Based Gaming Conference (ITBG) is back! This year, ITBG will be hosted on M*U*S*H (mush.pennmush.org:4201) the morning of October 17th, and boasts a handful of most interesting presenters.

M*U*S*H will once again be hosting the annual MUDtoberfest, a celebration of our shared pastime, through the month of October. You -- yes, YOU! -- are invited to stop by, partake of the festivities, and even run something should the inspiration strike you.

Currently scheduled events can be viewed with '+gda 10' on M*U*S*H. If you'd like to run something, schedule it with +gda (+gda/help for details). Don't be shy!

On a related note... The Innovations and New Directions in Text-Based Gaming Conference will be held on October 17th! Have you thought about where text is going? If you have ideas about the future of text gaming (online or offline), whether they're practical considerations or wild half-baked theories, we want to hear them! @mail Zebranky on M*U*S*H or email andzew@mezcuzic.net (replacing z with r) with your ideas!