Whats New on the Mud Connector

We are proud to announce that we are no longer offering commerial banner advertising effective April 20, 2012. Instead will be offering free banner advertising throughout the website, including the front page. More information is available here.

We are happy to announce that TMC is running on a new server. The migration went smoothly but please be sure to report to us any problems you find as there are likely to be some things that were missed. Thanks from Icculus.

We are proud to announce the release of mobile.tmc, our Free iphone app that allows you to keep up with the latest discussions, mud additions and mud reviews posted to the TMC website.

We have finally replaced our java-based telnet client with a new flash client (based on Fmud) thanks to Matt Adcock of mudgamers.com and Maiden Desmodus. One big feature this adds to TMC is the ability to add 'Play now' links for each mud listing, hopefully removing some of the obstacles potential new mudders face with using their local telnet apps.

Thank you to everyone contributing in the TMC layout preview discussion thread, your comments are very helpful. I feel comfortable promoting the new design to live status given the lack of serious glitch reports. I will continue to tweak as needed and listen to your suggestions in that thread.

I setup the large logo image randomizer and have now tagged several TMC pages to run those logos in the top of page ad banner location. The initial list of pages is provided here and as we add new pages to that list we will either post an update here or modify the list in this news blurb.

Pages running mud logo banners:

• Mud Introduction Page
• TMC: Whats New Page
• TMC: Faq
• TMC: Mediakit
• TMC: Articles Index
• TMC: Reviews Index
• TMC: All Mud Rankings
• TMC: Random Mud Listing

I can't believe another year has flown by so quickly, and nothing worthy to have been included in the whats new list for all of 2008? Ack! That makes it all the better that I can announce the changes just made to the TMC listings. Muds may now upload two images for promoting their muds: 1) a small logo that is included in the mud listings by default, sized at 160w x 230h pixels and 2) a larger banner image that will be put into gen. rotation in some as of yet determined locations on the site. The banner has a size limit for now of 728w x 90h pixels. The same restrictions apply to the banners that we will allow as do to other areas of the site like the discussion boards, in general nothing offensive or that violates the terms of service. All banners will be verified by TMC staff to make sure they are 'ok to run'. A quick note - the 160w x 230h size for the small logo is what will look best in a typical mud listing, though if muds already have smaller logos they wish to run that is fine. Please have a look at the submission system, the logo upload system can be found in the Edit your listing section. Holler with any questions!

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>