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8:31am on Friday, 10th October, 2025:
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Back in the late 1990s and early 200s, there was an email discussion list called MUD-DEV. All the main designers and developers subscribed to it, and many of the practical, theoretical and philosophical issues to do with virtual worlds were thrashed out in its posts. After it closed, all these posts were archived (you can read them at https://mud-dev.zer7.com/).
When graphical worlds came out and made a bigger splash than MUDs, the equivalent was the Terra Nova blog. As with the MUD-DEV list, some of the discussions were absolute gold dust, and they shaped the way that virtual worlds affected the real world and vice versa. Every two or three months I go back to specific conversations we had there, to see what the arguments for and against some position were, and what points were raised speculatively about different ways to think about virtual worlds.
Terra Nova's URL was https://terranova.blogs.com . That's a Typepad site. Typepad is now "closed for business". All its content has been purged.
The Wayback Machine seems to have captured Terra Nova's content (1,639 times) at https://web.archive.org/web/20240327021136/https://terranova.blogs.com, but so far my attempts to get it to load have been fruitless. It spends all its time in "Just a moment..." mode, perhaps because it's trying to load every post at once.
I do hope that all Terra Nova's posts and conversations have been captured. It would be a sad day for virtual-world research if they were gone forever.
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