August 2026 MUDVerse Update

[u/MudVerse]

Hey all,

I wanted to pass along some updates that I've made to MUDVerse since my last post 6 months ago. The goal remains to provide an easy, mature service to the MUD community that is built to last, and can be relied upon and built upon by the community.

We're about to hit 20 years online, which is wild. Some of the PHP code that runs the site hasn't been touched since 2007. I'm in the process of doing a larger overhaul to the entire PHP codebase, but that's for a future post.

New Features

• MUDVerse API: Authenticated, rate-limited JSON API for game search, listing details, tags, MSSP snapshots, and player history. Includes API-key management, an account-level API explorer, full documentation, and OpenAPI 3.1 definitions. MSSP wise, we have historical data going back to 2022 though the API currently limits the query to 1 year in the past. If you've got a use case that requires more, email me and I can get you setup. Or if you just want a dump of the entire 2 gigs of historical MSSP data I can get that to ya, cause why not.
• Listing lifecycle management: Owners and administrators can archive unreachable games. Archived listings retain their historical pages but disappear from search, rankings, discovery, sitemaps, and API collections; saving an updated listing reactivates it automatically.
• Web Only Games: Added the ability to mark a game as 'web only' if it's only playable from a website. Lets us flag web only games and include/exclude them from search results. Also lets the MUDVerse MSSP / Connectivity crawler ignore these games.
• Secure game connections: Listings gained an optional TLS port, and “Play Now” automatically chooses encrypted transport when configured. This release also fixed rendering and editing of legacy escaped descriptions.
• Added a MUD Clients page. If anyone has a client they think should be added, you can email me.

Web Client Update

We use the Dome Client as our client. It's what powers the 'Play Now' functionality on a games listing page. I maintain this client and I've made extensive updates to the web client that MUDVerse uses. It's been fully modernized, and it now supports TrueColor and not just xterm256.

There are too many updates to mention here, but some highlights: Faster rendering, smaller memory footprint in browser, customizable settings, better mobile support.

It's open source and runs on Node: Dome Client (Github) and Hosted Public Client (website). You can clone, contribute, or roll your own if you want. It's designed for MOOs, but I've taken care to support all MUDs. Bugs and feature requests welcome on the repo. Especially if there are issues with a specific MUD and how it renders colors, or various MUD protocols.

Site Wide Game Review

I've reviewed all the games that we detected haven't been online in the last 3 months, and archived listings where the game and website are offline.

• Archived ~50 games
• Marked 12 as web only

Other Updates

• Updated the MSSP crawler bot to the latest Node.js runtime, with better logging, MSSP recognition, and integration with MUDVerse.
• Improved game description handling so legacy escaped line breaks and apostrophes render cleanly on listing pages and edit forms.
• Fixed a ton of bugs (thank you everyone who reported issues) especially around updating and deleting reviews.
• Added a bunch of admin facing reporting so I can more easily detect and triage dead listings and possible web only games.

Boring Server Stuff

• Went from 0% test coverage to 92% test coverage!
• Upgraded all our PHP dependencies to their most modern versions
• Upgraded MudVerse to PHP 8 and a newer version of MySQL.
• Added several missing indexes to support faster rendering & API calls
• Moved the site to an updated server (Ubuntu 16 -> 26, ec2 t2.small to t3.micro) for a stronger foundation going forward.
• Moved the DB from hosted on the instance to be hosted in RDS with better backups (also lets us offer the API as the little ec2 instance wasn't going to be able to support a lot of load on MySQL)
• Fixed a number of bugs and hardened the codebase to improve security and stability.

MSSP

If your game doesn't offer MSSP, please consider supporting it! This documentation walks you through how to do it. If anyone gets stuck implementing it and wants a rubber duck to talk to and help with the implementation, please feel free to reach out via email and I'll do my best to support!

Feature Requests and Feedback

I'm always looking for feedback, bug reports, and feature requests. Contact info is on the website if you want to reach out.

[u/Zykov]

I highly echo the notion of wishing for more games to support mssp.

[u/TheKnightBlade3]

Nice, I use mudverse regularly to vote for my favorite mud, keep up the good work!

[u/FlightOfTheUnicorn]

\o/ Yay MudVerse!