Lawl. Stealth punishment. I remember on a mud I played the admins were flagging people as "idiots." It would put an idiot tag next to their name in chat and color coded the chat to grey for others viewing their messages. (Which was the code there for non-important messages.) It was kinda funny but people would go a while without ever realising it. In that regard, it was a little caddy at best.

Fwiw, the game I started on 15 years ago used the term mute for revoking chat privileges.

don't remember who said it must be a rom thing, but this was on a Circle mud. I've heard it called mute silence nochan and gag but I've played a wide variety of muds. I was a bit of a trouble maker when I was in highschool too so I got silenced on many different muds back then.

As for this mud, I think mute only affects the main gossip channel called comlink. I'm not sure if it affects any of the others but I know it doesn't affect the question or answer channels. and it probably doesn't affect the say channels either but that went untested. they probably have another command there for complete silence of channels and then another for everything plus the says. that's how a lot of muds I've worked on did it.

This dude is hilarious. Love Jeff Dunham

I also discussed my silence command on TMC a few years ago, along with some of the other means I use to prevent undesirable activities:

hmm that's an interesting take on the silence command that I've never thought of before. You're entirely correct though, any time I get silenced and it tells me so I just get pissed off and change chars to bitch about being silenced. Though I don't know that the silence trick would work on a smarter-than-average person more than once. They'll eventually figure out that they can just log off and then back on to be heard. Though that's when the other punishment commands come in handy I guess.

Or he could just keep up the act and they'd never know! KaVir, got any good logs outta this?

Well the command wasn't really intended for established players who might know the ins and outs, but for newbies who just log on to spam adverts. I eventually had to take it a step further though, when the owner of another mud used to wait until I'd gone to bed before logging on around a dozen bots to spam all the public channels (he had a grudge against one of my players and decided to take it out on the mud).

To deal with that I added a "spamblock" feature, which silences everyone connected from your IP address and also prevents new characters being created from your IP address. Your spamblock counter goes up every time you broadcast a message, and goes down over time. I've tweaked it a few times, and it's still not perfect, but it does do a good job of stopping spammers.

And sorry, no logs - I keep meaning to add log or snoop, but have never gotten around to it.