Vanished as in I cannot get a copy of it at all, or will I have to ask if I could get a copy from someone who still has it?
Vanished as in it was closed-source and run from a central server, which authors could connect to to write their own “realms” in I7.
I can’t say this will be easy but you could have a go with Guncho if you like,
Does guncho have a Windows version?
I don’t think there’s a Windows binary (.exe) but considering that Jesse (vaporware here on the forum) wrote it in C# for Mono (i.e. Linux) it’s very likely it wouldn’t be too hard to build one for .NET (i.e. Windows). You’d have to ask him.
Aetheria Game Engine is an IF system that also implements RPG elements (combat mechanics, weapons, armor, magic, etc.) and allows real-time and multiplayer, so in principle it has the basic elements for a MUD. The system is multilingual and can produce games in English although, unfortunately, the documentation is only in Spanish at the moment. But since it’s online maybe you’d like to give it a go with Google Translate (from what I’ve seen, it makes a rather decent job).
Project site including downloads: code.google.com/p/aetheria/
Documentation: caad.es/aetheria/doc/
I’d really like to make Guncho to work, but I can’t compile the open source version, it complains a Guncho.Core folder is missing. And can’t find the mono .exe anywhere.
Inform 7 is a great tool to design worlds, and it seems perfect for me for this purpose. Most MUD are quite strange for designing rooms, you have to enter the world, add objects from there and they are stored in the database. But you can’t review the whole code of your world (it seems Seltani works a bit this way). I find it easier to have a source code, and you can also generate stuff automatically this way.
Seltani lets you export the source code for a world as a big JSON file. It would clearly be good to be able to import a file (the opposite direction). I implemented a crude version of this, but it’s too rickety to release and I never got around to improving it.
I’ve made a quick test of Aetheria, and it looks quite interesting. I’ll try it more in the future for sure!
I’m also deeply interested in Seltani, which looks very appealing. I’ve tried to install it on my server (I like to have control on everything before investing time in a project), but the requirement (recent mongodb, recent pip) is too new for my computer. Maybe with the next release of linux mint in April or May…
The Seltani installation process has some bumps anyhow. It’s not very automatic. Hopefully I can smooth that out before the next time anybody tries. 
I just spent several hours tinkering with the Seltani installation process. It was a learning experience. For example, I learned that I’m not very good with terminals and that I’m a little afraid of installing things from the command line when I can’t just reinstall at whim from usb.
Ultimately, I was able to register a new account and get in but my admin password never arrived. Think I need to dig up a different sending email account. But I’m feeling pretty proud right now. And I definitely feel like I know my Mac better!
I fixed several setup bugs and wrote a rudimentary install docs page:
seltani.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Installation
It describes how to set the Admin password from the command line without going through the email process.
You may want to fetch the updated server code and start from scratch. I didn’t realize you were trying it this evening! Sorry for your extra effort. But learning OS stuff is always fun.
Back when I was playing MUDs, there was a web-based GUI editor/hosting service that was advertised on the database sites, but I just searched for it, and it seems to be gone. I think the URL was mudmaker.com.
I wanted to try making a MUD too, but MUD development is a lot less accessible than IF development. If you just want to make a MUD on your own computer, you’ll have to make your computer into a server. There are hosting services, but I don’t think there were ever many good hosting options for free. I don’t even know what the procedure for managing the server space is. I don’t know if you use FTP, or if you only need a telnet client.
Another MUD GUI that I was interested in at one time was the ancestor of the current Quest system – everybody complained about the parser and the quality of the text adventures produced with the old Quest, but at one point it had the ability to create and host multiplayer games. I never tried it, but my impression of the documentation was that it was trying to model the behavior of MUDs.
I heard that TADS 3 can do multiplayer, at least hypothetically. If I still had time and motivation, I’d check it out.
TADS 3 can definitely do multiplayer - you can do multiplayer sessions on (some?) IFDB games.
Running a mud at home just for development by yourself is easier than you might think. Once the mud is running (just like a normal application), telnet’ing to localhost on the correct port is all you need to do. If you want friends to connect, you can register at a dynamic IP service, forward a port on your router, and you’re basically done.
Nice, I’ll set back up. I’m not actually intending to host a public server myself – these things are much more fun with other people! I have a couple of friends who are interested in trying IF but who are primarily MUDders and I wanted to see if they’d want to tinker with it. I really think a hybrid medium – one that combines the best of MUDs (puzzles, combat, quests) and MUSHes (building, community) – is the only hope the hobby has of surviving. That’s what appeals to me most about Seltani; there’s potential for that feeling of personal involvement that you don’t get from hanging out on a MUD killing goblins while waiting for the GMs to run an event for the level 180s.
And I’m really proud I managed to get it mostly working (normally I’d have run screaming as soon as commands started to look like line noise – curl what? bash where?). It helped a lot that I’d already installed homebrew, I think!
…whew! It works perfectly! Thank you for updating the installation page, that went much better. And so much easier to be able to set the password directly!
I ran into a few issues, but I’d already figured them out last night. TextEdit does something funky to the apostrophes in the config file; I got around this by cutting and pasting one of the straight apostrophes as needed. I had to move the tworld folder to /usr/local/var, next to the mongodb folder (the terminal gives the correct path on error when you try localhost). And I had to add the tworld and tworld lib folders to my PYTHONPATH in my .bash_profile file (at least, I think that’s what those lines do).
Well, I have a modest MUD builder website that was created for fun. Its pretty rudimentary, but requires no installing of software and everything is browser based.
Its at MUDGameMaker.com
It allows for pretty easy story, room, and item creation. No combat though. 
Hey, that’s interesting. I’m really curious about what your experience of muds is, what games you’ve played, and if you’ve joined mud forums and what not.
I have played a couple of MUDS, like God Wars II, and am a semi regular visitor to IFMUD. I have not joined any MUD forums, because I have not found any.
If you’re still interested in compiling Guncho, I can help. I haven’t tested it under Mono; it may work, but your best bet is to run it on Windows. You’ll need to compile from the 1.0 branch, since the trunk is still “under development”. Feel free to send me a PM or email if you have any questions.