There is a cardinal rule of the muck that I believe has been ignored far too much lately: "treat all other players and staff with respect." Perhaps because it's buried at the end of the rules page, or perhaps because there is a lack of understanding about what that means.

What does respect mean?

The dictionary gives a somewhat unclear definition, so I'm going to give my own.

• Understanding that on the other end of the computer screen is another human being with feelings and faults, and not expecting perfection from them.
• Recognizing that others have a right to their opinion.
• Treating others in ways that won't make them feel uncomfortable, even if you don't like them or agree with them.

There seems to be a lack of RP recently, no?

Planning is all good and well, but noone will know anything, or be able to chip in and help if there isn't better communication going on.
Meetings!! This isn't that hard of a concept. You can't expect the MUCK as a whole to be content with just a few blog postings every month or so. I don't mean council meetings either, this is purely OOC...

As many of you have no doubt seen, NIMHmuck has been rather quiet on the RP front of late. While there are various reasons for this, perhaps one of the biggest is IC complacency. In other words, the Rats have it too good. While they have some minor problem from time to time, they can too easily retreat inside the colony and isolate themselves from these problems. The problems inside the colony are likewise of little or no concern to the average colonist; it's politics as usual, but nothing that would seem to affect someone one way or another. Nicodemus may have had the right idea by trying to keep the rats in peaceful isolation, but they are nevertheless still falling into the trap of complacency. Unchanging, static, relatively boring, unless some more or less contrived drama is conceived.

We need a catastrophe.

The muck (and website) will be going down sometime tomorrow (Saturday, Dec 13) in order for me to prepare to move out of my apartment for graduation. Jeff has volunteered to host the server again, but there may be some interruption in service while we get the database transferred over. Thanks for your patience.

We are currently running a survey on NIMHmuck to get a better feel about where we should direct our efforts in helping make the muck a better place overall and for RP in particular. Just log in to NIMHmuck and type 'survey'--the program will take things from there. Also, your answers are completely anonymous (we can only tell if you've taken the survey), so respond with confidence!

Tzolkin will be handling a lot of behind-the-scenes maintenance and coding to help make the muck a nicer, more user-friendly place to visit. If there's a bug, or if you'd like to request a feature on the muck, let him or any other wizstaff know, and we'll definitely consider it. If it's a good idea, it's very likely to make the muck.

Log of his inauguration follows:

In preparation for my internship, I will be moving the server that hosts Thorn Valley and NIMHmuck.org on Wednesday, April 16 to my sister's home (yay for nice sisters!) and hosting it on her connection for the 3 months that I will be away on my internship. The server will be down from around 1 PM MDT, and won't be back up until it's back up--hopefully around 6-7 PM MDT. Update: The server was moved successfully.

I'm not sure if anyone will be able to see this, but here goes: Thorn Valley's DNS is having issues, which is causing problems for people who want to connect. If muck.nimhmuck.org isn't working for you, try either thornvalley.dyndns.org or 67.161.219.243 instead.

Update (Nov 17): I've had Jeff make some changes to the DNS, so things should start working again normally for NIMHmuck. Note that Thorn Valley is still down however.

Update (Nov 23): The muck's been having some glitchiness for some unknown reason. I'm back from vacation so I should be able to keep a closer eye on things. Please let me know if you see anything out of the ordinary.