Hey everyone,
A lot changed around Mudhaven this weekend. Most of it focused on making the community features easier to use, improving game and resource listings, and giving hosted game owners better tools.
Here are the changes that matter most to members.
Forums and Post Editor
The forum editor received a major upgrade. It now supports:
- Bold, italic, headings, lists, quotes, links, and inline
code - A live preview before publishing
- Mentions, reactions, bookmarks, and discussion subscriptions
- View counts on forum posts
- Better formatting when pasting prepared announcements or guides
Forum posts now autosave to your account while you write. You can recover your work after refreshing, signing out, or moving to another device.
Your private drafts are available under Account → My Drafts. You can resume or discard them from there. Drafts expire after 30 days without another save.
Direct Messages and Notifications
Mudhaven now has a complete private messaging system with a redesigned inbox.
You can:
- Send and reply to direct messages
- Control who is allowed to message you
- Block individual members
- Maintain a friends list
- Save favorite contacts
- Create custom contact lists
- Send one message to a selected group
- Search for available recipients while composing
- Organize conversations with pins, archives, and other inbox tools
Account notifications have also moved into the inbox under the Notifications tab.
Members who disable direct messages will not appear as available recipients to ordinary users. Mudhaven administrators can still deliver official account, moderation, or hosting messages when necessary.
Member Profiles
The separate builder-profile system has been replaced with one unified member profile.
Profiles can now show your:
- MUD or BYOND interests
- Development and building specialties
- Featured worlds and resources
- Collaboration availability
- Community information
Mudhaven can also assign verified profile tags such as:
- Site Owner
- MUD Developer
- BYOND Developer
- MUD Builder
Profiles are listed by default. If you do not want your profile included in the member directory, you can unlist it from your account settings.
World Listings
World listings received a significant visual redesign.
Game banners are displayed more naturally instead of being aggressively cropped, and icons now have clearer placement throughout the directory and detail pages. The submission forms also explain the recommended banner and icon sizes.
When an owner submits changes to an approved world, the existing listing now remains online while the revision waits for staff approval. Visitors continue seeing the last approved information until the update is accepted.
World owners can also provide live information through Mudhaven’s game-reporting API, including:
- Current player count
- Online state
- Game version
- Wizlock or maintenance state
- Approved custom public fields
Listings that do not use the reporting API no longer display misleading online or offline labels.
MUD Hosting and Protocol Support
Mudhaven’s MUD hosting tools now include better support for modern MUD protocols and public capability reporting.
Hosted game owners have access to clearer documentation for game reporting, protocol discovery, secure connections, browser-play monitoring, and custom public API fields.
The public directory can use this information to present more accurate connection and game-status details without collecting player identities, chat, saved data, or database access.
BYOND Hosting
The BYOND hosting portal received substantial reliability and usability work.
Improvements include:
- Clearer runtime and connection-test results
- Better stopped-game explanations
- Managed project files and folders
- Safer uploads and conflict handling
- Backup and recovery protections
- File-integrity monitoring
- Runtime health information
- Stronger production-readiness checks
- Better owner-facing status and troubleshooting messages
Connection tests now explain when a game is simply stopped instead of presenting a confusing generic failure.
Resources and Newsletters
Resources now display both view counts and download counts, making it easier to see what the community is using.
Newsletters also have view counts and now support member comments. This gives everyone a place to discuss announcements without creating a separate forum thread for every issue.
Submissions and Staff Communication
Hosting requests, world submissions, resource submissions, revisions, feedback, and other important workflows now enter Mudhaven’s internal staff inbox.
This should make requests easier to track and reduce the chance of something being buried in email. Staff can see the type of request, its current state, and the appropriate review page from one place.
Feedback
There is now a Send Feedback link in the site footer.
Please use it for:
- Bugs
- Feature suggestions
- Hosting questions
- Listing problems
- General comments or complaints
A huge amount was completed this weekend, but I’m sure we will uncover a few rough edges as more people use everything. If something looks wrong or behaves unexpectedly, please send feedback and let me know what happened.
Sincerely,
Liko