Ahh, there ARE others out there!
As a fellow MUD admin (been working on ours for nearly 15 years now...gah) I sympathise with your tale entirely! Over the ages, I've seen sooooo many Sad Twats through our doors that I've lost count.

Indeed at one point we had an admin function called "ShitOn " that transformed the target into "a pile of shit" - thereafter, whenever they tried to use any social/emote command, they'd be presented with the classic message "You cannot do that, for you are a pile of shit."

Happy days!
(EffinDoubt is breaking glass on, Mon 3 Nov 2008, 14:50, 2 replies)

Still have the source code
This was the code:

if (strcmp(player.title,"the Sad Twat")==0) {
send_to_char("You are a sad twat and you cannot shout.\n\r",ch) ;
return ;
}

Shout, tell, whisper, say were all done a similar way. I have to say 16 years on that my programming was pretty awful at the time.
(MagicMoose, Mon 3 Nov 2008, 15:00, closed)

Fucking with players' communication is fun.
I'm trying to write a module now that will allow people to curse each other - it'll find a specified word in their talkline and change it to what you want.

I can see the results as being subtle and infuriating (changing "the" to "teh," "where" to "when" and such), or not-so-subtle (changing "fight" to "molest," appending "without my pants" or "so HARD" to every sentence), but either way it should be fun.

(personally I think this should be a feature on every message board on the whole internet. It'd make it far more fun to discuss politics and such. Without my pants)
(CavemanJoe lives on improbableisland.com, Mon 3 Nov 2008, 16:03, closed)

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, closed)

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)