I currently MUD on Aardwolf (www.aardmud.org) and have been experiencing a rather annoying phenomenon since I began using MUSHclient rather than Zmud (a year or two ago, with MUSHclient 3.5). Aardwolf has a fairly large number of features built in to conserve bandwidth and one of those suppresses the prompt unless you actually send or receive information from the MUD. (Send a command, see a channel, get attacked, etc...)
I tend to keep most of the channels off, which results in fairly lengthy periods of no actual output from the MUD. Unfortunately, I've noticed that if the period without any output from the MUD lasts long enough, MUSHclient seems to lose the connection entirely. Though I should recieve occassional messages (notably notification when I have a quest available), the screen will just stay blank, only displaying a disconnect message when I send a command to the MUD. (This actually happens occassionally with only short breaks in the output as well, actually.)
I have created a trigger and script to send a blank line to the MUD every two minutes for the time being. However, that isn't an ideal solution and I don't know if this is actually just a setting that I have wrong somewhere, an isolated problem due to my network configurations (I am assuming this isn't the case since I didn't have the problem with Zmud), or an actual bug with MUSHclient.
I routinely have MUSHclient running for days at a time, and it never disconnects.
What I think is much more likely is that your router, or firewall, has some sort of setting that drops connections if it doesn't detect activity for, say, an hour.
It is possible that zMUD is programmed to send some sort of "harmless" message routinely for that very reason.
I suggest setting up a timer, that does something that keeps the router happy (eg. send a blank line), at an appropriate interval, eg. an hour.
Alternatively, see if you can change the router configuration.
I see after re-reading your message that you have in fact done that.
If you want to see if this is really a MUSHclient bug, I suggest using some sort of "dumb" program, like telnet that ships with Windows, to see if it also loses the connection after the same interval. My guess is that it will.
I typically leave my 'god' character online even when I'm not around, so I tend to be idle alot. I find that zMUD disconnects me relatively often when this is the case (~1 hour or so).
I've had this problem. I'll see if I can dig up my post. It's not MUSHclient. Basically, you're getting dropped from a hop somewhere because it's timing out. Causes would be downloading or uploading in excess, which what I was doing.
Windows also has a default, "Disconnect after X when not active.", setting, which on some versions has an obstinate habit of ignoring anything not using http or ftp. Until I turned that off I had everything from *active* mushclient sessions to P2P software disconnected on, because the stupid OS didn't think they even qualified as activity. I.e. 5k/s data downstream and 1-2k/s upstream, but the OS still insisted the connection wasn't in use... Unfortunately, this problem can arise from a dozen places and is a major pain in the ass, unless you are lucky and find what is causing it on the first try.
I did try with Telnet and I played for about an 45 minutes when I finally got disconnected. So it didn't seem to happen quite as quickly, but it did still happen. That was on my laptop, so I'll probably try it today on my computer as well.
That setting for Windows sounds promising as far as tracking this down, so I'll see if I can find that before I start fiddling with my router.
I assume it works the same in all Windows versions, so:
1. Right click on the Internet Explorer icon.
2. Select "Properties".
3. Go to the "Connections" tab.
4. Pick the connection you use, then click "Settings".
5. Click "Advanced".
You should find two settings:
'Disconnect if idle for [30] minutes.'
'Disconnect when connection may no longer be needed.'
Make sure both are unchecked. That fixed solved the problem for me.
Ahh, I don't think that is going to help after all. The connection settings are for dial up connections and I'm on a network that accesses the internet using cable. I think the problem is probably with my network settings since I am experiencing it on multiple computers.
I was thinking that you were talking about a setting for the telnet connection initially. When I lose my connection to the MUD, that is the only thing that I am losing, not my actual internet access.
I'll have to keep looking, but it seems that past solutions have basically been keeping the link active, which I'm doing now, so that may end up the only solution.
Yes, when you lose the connection, you're still connected to the 'net. Your connection to the MUD is just dropped. That's "normal" in this condition.
What are you on? A LAN? What kind of connection is it? Are you home, or say at a college? If it's a LAN, it's probably being "lagged" enough to have your connection dropped. Causes could be others on the LAN using a notable amount of bandwidth. Examples would be using Bittorrent, an eDonkey server, or perhaps an online game.
I'm at home on a network with four or five other computers on it any given time. We have a standard cable modem providing our internet connection.
I haven't really experienced much lag that I've noticed, unless it is coming only in major bursts. There is one other user of file sharing, however, that is actually a recent development and this has been occurring for far longer than he has been doing that. (And it occurs when the rest of the computers in the house are off as well.) I usually don't have anything like that running on my computer.
I suppose it could be someone in the same area as us using cable, however, we were on DSL until awhile ago. Hmm... actually, I need to look into when we switched to cable, that might have been right around the time I started using MUSHclient.