FAQ
Glad you asked!
For starters...
Everyone who ever had an account in MediaMOO!
MediaMOO was built literally by the words the users typed into the system over all the years it was in operation!
Of course it would never have existed at all without Dr. Amy Bruckman who first convinced MIT to let her have such an exotic and new system open for access to people outside MIT back in 1993.
This current incarnation is thanks to Dr. Cynthia Haynes and Dr. Jan Rune Holmevik at Clemson University for their unflagging support of MOOS for education and convincing Clemson University to allow us to setup a MOO server and make it accessible to the Internet.
Special thanks to Dr. Michael Day at Northwestern Illinois University for protecting this piece of Internet history.
The wonderful Node.js system for putting Telnet MOOs safely on the Internet was created by Jack Lewis for Literary Worlds MOO at Western Michigan University.
Thanks to Dr. Allen Webb at Western Michigan for his continued support of using MOO technology on the modern Internet.
Thanks to Kevin Jepson for porting MediaMOO over to a modern system, configuring it to make it available to users and researchers, and creating the website to support the MediaMOO Redux Project.
This copy of MediaMOO was created by Dr Michael Day at the Northern Illinois University in 2003. It was running at that time locally, on a PC under his desk in his office actually. Since it was not publicly accessible it is essentially a snapshot of MediaMOO as it existed in 2001 when it was last available to users.
It is important to make it available to researchers and MOO coders but in order to protect this historical digital artifact changes are restricted to only those necessary to enable it to run.
The Change Log has a list of the changes made to enable MediaMOO to be accessible again on the public Internet.
Any changes made to the database by guests and old users will disappear whenever the MOO is restarted thus preserving this snapshot of Internet history.
Yes!
Anybody is allowed to login as a guest and explore to their heart's content!
You can get access from the Login entry on the menu bar above.
Sure!
Feel free to login and enjoy your old haunts.
Your old password should still work, however, if you have forgotten that over the intervening 20 years (!) please contact us and we will be happy to reset it for you.
Note that this change will only be temporary as the change will disappear next time MediaMOO is restarted.
Short answer:
Yes!
However since this is an archive any such changes will disappear next time MediaMOO is restarted.
Longer answer:
Yes but...
This copy of MediaMOO is actually running normally. That means that all objects, processes, repeating tasks etc are operating. From a research perspective being able to interact with the live system is necessary. However, this is dangerous because some changes could cause loss of historical information. Which is why all changes are lost when MediaMOO is restarted and the archive is reloaded as it was when we received it from Dr Day.
No.
If you have an existing account you can use it otherwise please login as a guest.
All changes made are ephemeral lasting only until the next restart, which would include new accounts so there is no reason to create new ones.
Sort of.
You are welcome to port interesting objects for personal and research uses. However, you must include a note as to the source of the code and objects somewhere in your code. A verb info block or .source property on an object will work. Attribution to a MediaMOO user if it is known should be included as well.
We are working on a formal Open Source License for this data and will update this FAQ item with that information once determined.
We would also love to hear what you are using this code for, so send us an email to let us know!
The web based login to MediaMOO is an emulator using a websocket connection to a Node.js process running on the server. The Node.js process acts as an intermediary between MediaMOO's native Telnet and the Web.
The display has two styles that can be toggled by clicking "TERM" in the Title bar of the Terminal. The default display is black text on a white background, clicking TERM will toggle the display to a retro Green on Black screen.
Text output from MediaMOO is sent to a hidden text area which is then "scraped" by the terminal and displayed to the user. This refresh happens every second. This allows the system to use some html codes for display if needed.
You can use the terminal scrollbar to go up and see text from earlier in the session, while scrolled this way new text will continue to be added at the bottom. The whole screen scroll only happens when scrolled all the way to the bottom so if you notice nothing appearing make sure you are scrolled right down.
The screen refresh prevents highlighting and copying of the displayed text but can be paused using the ">" switch in the Text Input bar at the bottom of the terminal. While paused highlighting and copying of the displayed text will work. Output from MediaMOO is still being added and will appear once the screen is unpaused.
The Terminal does not emulate any particular kind of Text Terminal. The only screen control available, other than those mentioned above, is "Ctrl L" which will clear the text out of the visible display. This does NOT delete the text though, it simply writes enough carriage return linefeeds to move everything out of the way!
No, it isn't lag.
What is happening is that as the text piles up in the hidden text area it starts to take more time to update the display. This becomes really apparent if you are doing a lot of @dumps of large or complex objects.
If it gets unmanageable the best way to clear it is to click the "CLS" on the right side of the menu bar in the terminal. This will ask for confirmation and if you click "OK" it will remove ALL the text, including the @dumps, from your session. Make sure you have copied everything you want before you do that!
Guests have been given access to the @dump command, type "help @dump" to see what commands are available.
The permissions applied to this code allow the display of any properties or verbs that would be readable by a generic user on MediaMOO.
When a Guest character runs the @dump command an iframe is displayed on the screen containing the output. When the output is complete, the user will be shown a prompt asking for the user to pause the scrolling to enable the data in the frame to be examined and copied. The iframe has an independent scrollbar for long listings.
Make sure you unpause the scrolling when you are done or you won't see any new output from the Moo!
Yes!
Use the following commands to change your character.
Note that these changes will only remain for this session and will have to be re-entered next time you log in.
@name
Change the name and alias that other users will see for this session. The command will prompt the user for the name to use.
@describe me as "Description desired"
Changes your description to whatever is included between the quotes.
You can change your name or description anytime during a session but it is probably best to keep the same name to avoid confusing other players.