I must hang my head in shame
For I too played (and still play) MUDs. There is definitely a huge selection of eccentrics and weirdos to pick from the players of those games. There have been times in the past where a "ShitOn" command would have been wonderful to deal with some of the more irritating players I have seen.
( Templeton Blah, blah, blah..., Mon 3 Nov 2008, 16:36, 1 reply)

MUDs...
...as I remember were really just chatrooms. Everyone went to the same place and chatted, and that was it.
(inflateable, Mon 3 Nov 2008, 18:02, closed)

Different flavours of MUD
I used to run a DikuMUD variant which was more about playing the content than sitting around talking shit. People did that of course, but there was real fun to be had playing the game. So you'd start off in a town killing beastly fidos, and start adventuring further out to the east, west or south, level up gain skills etc. I liked Diku - it reminded of Linux in some ways being quite ad hoc in some ways but also very playable and easy to get going.

The game which was most akin to IRC or Second Life would be TinyMUD and its variants. That was more like a world creating toolkit and everyone who played got to make their own stuff to go in the world. It wasn't a game, more like Second Life in text. Personally I found it boring as hell since there was no consistency to it at all. One minute you're in a spaceport and some guy is begging you to play with the laser he's just made, then you head go south and next you're trapped in a medieval dungeon owned by some other guy with no seeming way out because the designer hasn't bothered to hook up any exits. I hate SL as much as I hated TinyMUD.
(MagicMoose, Tue 4 Nov 2008, 11:37, closed)