Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!utastro!dougi
From: dougi@utastro.UUCP (Doug Ingram)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: RE: Call for Discussion: rec.games.mud
Message-ID: <4781@utastro.UUCP>
Date: 2 Feb 90 18:00:56 GMT
Organization: U. Texas, Astronomy, Austin, TX
Lines: 42


	I'm all for the development of this newsgroup.  The related
alt.mud newsgroup which covers the same topic (ostensibly multi-user
domains or dimensions, as you prefer) has been very successful as
far as providing useful information and discussions regarding the
development of mud's and mud-related software.

	While the purpose of the typical mud is largely for entertainment
of the masses, much of the discussion around it has been somewhat 
technical in the sense that one must be familiar with mud "jargon" to
be able to follow it successfully.  Also, since most of the mud-related
software (such as tinytalk) is written in either C or emacs code, many
non-programmers (or programmers who are still mired down in Fortran or
Pascal) expecting a discussion of a recreational mud often find themselves
waist-deep in Computer Science before they know it.

	I'm not saying that the group should be sci.mud or anything,
but perhaps rec.games.mud would be a misleading name for the group
(provided it has similar content to alt.mud, which I think is a
reasonable assumption).  Certainly*, the group should not be placed
under the rec.games.frp heirarchy as a previous poster suggested.
Even though using a mud involves a small of amount of role-playing,
the discussions are not related to that topic at all.

	Sorry that I'm not offering any "solutions" as to what I think
the group should be named, but this is discussion, right?  Anyway, 
rec.games.mud will probably come out in the end to be the least 
horrible of all of the possible names for a mud-related newsgroup.
Other possibilities that might be kicked around, though, could be
either comp.[nothing,programmer,software,language.c,emacs,etc].mud
or just plain rec.mud.

Thanks,
Thief			* - standard disclaimer (IMHO in this case)

:hopes this doesn't turn into a flame war.

                   --------------------
"If at all possible, you should avoid being a young person or a wheat
 farmer when the president starts feeling international tension."
						-- Dave Barry
Doug Ingram      dougi@astro.as.utexas.edu        dougi@utastro.uucp