# mu*index

> A directory of the MU* hobby — MUSHes, MUDs, MUCKs and MOOs. Every value carries how it was obtained and when it was last confirmed. Values we took by connecting to a game are labelled measured; values a game published about itself are labelled declared; the two are shown side by side and never merged into one number.

Prefer the JSON API to parsing these pages: it is versioned, documented, and every value in it carries its source and the instant it was last confirmed. Failing that, append `?plain=1` to any page for a text rendering of the same facts, wrapped to 80 columns, with every state written as a word rather than drawn as a colour or a cell shape.

## Data

- [OpenAPI contract](https://mu-index.com/api/openapi.json): every endpoint below, machine-readable
- [API guide](https://mu-index.com/about/api): what each endpoint is for, and the limits on it
- [Games](https://mu-index.com/api/games): the catalogue, with the same facets the listing page offers
- [Bulk export](https://mu-index.com/api/dump/games.json): the whole catalogue as one JSON document
- [Bulk export, by line](https://mu-index.com/api/dump/games.ndjson): the same, one game per line, for a loader

## Pages

- [Games](https://mu-index.com/games): every game we have reached, faceted on what we measured
- [Rankings](https://mu-index.com/rankings): busiest and most reachable, computed from measurements
- [Ecosystem](https://mu-index.com/ecosystem): codebase share and protocol adoption, as shares never totals
- [Reference](https://mu-index.com/reference): written pages on the codebases, clients and protocols
- [Archive](https://mu-index.com/archive): games that went dark, still probed, nothing deleted
- [Crawler](https://mu-index.com/crawler): what the crawler did, and what it is due to do
- [About](https://mu-index.com/about): how the catalogue is built, and how an operator opts out

## Reading a value correctly

- **Measured** means we connected and observed it. **Declared** means the game published it about itself and we did not verify it. **Derived** means it is a classification of ours. Reporting a declared value as measured misstates it.
- **Reachable, never uptime.** We measure a socket from one vantage point at intervals. A game with a routing problem to our host is unreachable and perfectly alive; we did not measure whether it was up.
- **An hour has three states.** Counted (including a measured zero); reached but publishing no count we could read; and no measurement at all. The third names no cause — it covers an hour we could not reach and an hour we never probed alike. An unreadable player list is never zero players.
- **No absolute population figure is published.** Per-codebase and per-protocol shares are; totals are not. Do not sum the counts into one.
- **There are no votes, ratings or reviews here,** so nothing on this site measures a game's quality and nothing here should be cited as ranking one.

## Licence

The published data is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Attribute it to MUIndex (https://github.com/SharpMUSH/MUIndex).