communication upgrades
Since one of our biggest concerns at present is organizing the mudlib development and resuscitating the community, my first priority is improving communication between everyone.
Initially, this means two things:
- forums
- mudmail
We have existing systems for both of these, but both systems stink for one reason or another. Malap’s forum system served us very well for a number of years, but eventually began to fade around the edges, showing age and lack of maintenance. Mudmail… is pretty much a joke. The in-game client is mediocre at best and unusable in many cases.
My first project is going to be writing a very simple forum system - completely independent of Malap’s code but using his database schema. This will allow us to import the many years of existing forum content we already have without all of the overhead of the old site.
As part of bringing forums back, I want to build an in-game forum client. Muds have had bulletin board systems forever - we have had several previous attempts. It’s high time people can read the same forums from both inside and outside of the game.
Similarly, I am going to build a simple mudmail client for the web site - and only after it is fully functional on the web page will I build an in-game interface. Mudmail will have folders and will actually keep copies of sent messages for you 
Both of these systems will be indexed for easy searching from the web site.
Talk has been thrown around of post ratings and user karma for the forum system, about whether or not we will keep the current tree view, and about a few dozen other possible features. No decisions have been made either way on any of these extra features, so who knows?
Once mail and forums are running, we will continue looking into ways of improving communication. Twitter integration, the long-dreamed-of Jabber server, IRC capabilities of some sort or another, and even a mudmail-to-email gateway are all possible possibilities.