December 2024

It's been a while.

A few months ago, our MUD hosting service decided it was time to pack it in: "While we experienced a brief reprisal in the MU* community during the 2019-2020 pandemic, the MU* community has been in a state of significant decline for much of the past two decades." New customers weren't signing up, and the cost of keeping the lights on for us old-timers was getting to be too much.

I can't really fault them for their decision, and they handled the situation professionally, giving me an 18-month timeline for the shutdown. I started looking around for a new home, and it quickly became clear that the MUD and its website would not be able to live on the same server. I was left with a choice: relocate the website, or find a new MUD host—I can't do both right now. I chose the website.

The website gets some traffic, because I host my doctoral dissertation, professional portfolio, and Commodore projects on tierceron.com. The Commodore projects actually get the most attention, especially now that I'm more involved with The Toronto PET Users Group. And, to be honest, nobody visits the MUD, and I am the only admin/coder/builder putting any time in. I don't need a hosting service for that; I can run the MUD on a local machine and work on it in private. Although it's not quite the same working alone; the best part of working on the MUD was the community of creative types that sprung up around it. It gets lonely without them.

To be fair, there are still MUD hosting options out there, and I intend to make use of them someday. I hope that when that time comes, we can rebuild that sense of community. But for now, the MUD is quiet.

—Myles Skinner, a.k.a. Shamus Gregor, is the head implementor of Covenant MUD.