protocol
TLS
Encrypted connections. Usually a separate port rather than a negotiated upgrade, and the one capability on this site we verify by connecting rather than by asking.
Measured adoption
0 of 886 listed games — 0.0%
The games not counted here are not games without the protocol. A game is counted when we observed its server offering the option in a handshake; the rest are servers that did not offer it to us and servers whose handshake we have not read, and we cannot tell you which.
| codebase | offered it | identified |
|---|---|---|
| AresMUSH | 0 | 18 |
| CircleMUD | 0 | 47 |
| CobraMUSH | 0 | 2 |
| CoffeeMUD | 0 | 32 |
| DikuMUD | 0 | 35 |
| Evennia | 0 | 11 |
| FluffOS | 0 | 28 |
| MUCK | 0 | 24 |
| PennMUSH | 0 | 34 |
| RhostMUSH | 0 | 40 |
| ROM | 0 | 55 |
| SMAUG | 0 | 20 |
| tbaMUD | 0 | 5 |
| TinyMUSH | 0 | 9 |
Telnet is plaintext. Everything you send a MU* — including your password — crosses the network readable by anything on the path, unless the game offers TLS.
In this hobby TLS almost always means a second port that speaks TLS from the first byte, not an in-band upgrade. A game with a plain port on 4201 and a TLS port on 4202 is the common shape. There is a negotiated variant, and it is rare enough that at least one client's documentation explicitly says it is not supported.
Why the game pages mark this specially
TLS is the one capability on this site established by doing it: an endpoint is marked TLS because we completed a TLS handshake against it. There is no asking involved and no field to declare, which makes it the cleanest measurement in the catalogue.
That is also why a game's TLS port and its plain port are listed as separate endpoints rather than merged. They are different measurements of different things.
Practical advice
If a game you play offers a TLS port, use it. If it does not and you care, ask — it is a small amount of work for an administrator, and the reason it is not universal is mostly that nobody has asked rather than that anybody objects.
Check whether your client supports it before you rely on it. Several in the clients
section do; at least one documents a workaround with an external stunnel process instead, which
works and is more setup than most people will do.
See also
- How to connect A host, a port, and telnet. What the address on a game page means and what to do with it.
- CHARSET RFC 2066's telnet option for agreeing an encoding. The reason a game's accented names survive the trip, and the source of some subtle failures when it is absent.
- Potato MUSHclient A cross-platform Tcl/Tk client written for MUSH players. Good encoding support, and a documentation set that says nothing at all about most protocols.