AOI History & Guiding Principles

1. [199x (?)] AOI created: AOI started on an IBM 386 (confirm?) in Bub's garage, connected via his father's ISP, on: newton.whit.org:4000
2. [199x (?)] TBD: Some history here, maybe Ken can chime in
3. [199x (?)] Erabus takes over: Erabus took the reigns for hosting/administration
4. [June 1999] Playerwipe: To address the rampant cheating / ill-gotten equipment / etc., with support from the majority of players through a vote, Erabus conducted a player-wipe that erased everyone's characters, and everyone started from scratch.
5. [20xx (?)] Cerebus takes over: Cerebus took reigns for hosting/administration
6. [October 2013] Steve takes over: Steve took reigns for hosting/administration
7. [April 2025] Focus on documentation & portability: To reduce future headaches in maintaining the mud, this wiki has been started to serve as a more permanent set of documentation, and the mud infrastructure has configured to be more portable, with a more distributed disaster-recovery approach to ensure it stays up & alive.

1. Goal 1: Keep AOI alive and running — until the last person who cares about AOI is either dead or no longer interested in maintaining it.
2. Goal 2: Maintain a general democratic ethos behind AOI’s operation.

If the person currently hosting the AOI server and domain takes the project in a direction that the majority of the community disagrees with, there should always be an implicit (or explicit) check in place.

The current owner/administrator of AOI should always contend with the threat of losing control to the will of the majority:

“Screw this guy, we can always fork the game, start a new domain, and run our own instance, and take the players & coders with us.”

The *ideal* is to avoid this scenario through respectful dialogue and consensus-building. Splitting the playerbase and coderbase is not a great outcome. Still, leaving the door open for this kind of “peaceful fork” ensures transparency, accountability, and reinforces Goal 1.

I - Steve - am committed to keeping AOI alive for as long as I live — and I trust myself to do that. But it's worth planning for the unexpected:

• A) I could die.
• B) I could suffer a major life experience, or get a brain tumor, or traumatic brain injury, that alters my personality & priorities, to the point where I am no longer aligned with all of the above.
• (aka anyone who is not an asshole today, can easily become an asshole tomorrow due to factors outside of their control)
• C) I could hand off AOI to someone currently aligned with our vision, who later experience A or B.

The solution: The AOI game server, the documentation on how to make it work, and the means to run it, need to be distributed on a regular basis to ~5 or so key founding members. As key founding members fall off the radar in interest/desire to maintain, we should consider replacing them in the circle with others who do care.

Redundancy, shared responsibility, and transparency are key to making sure AOI outlives any one person. Or at least lives until the last remaining person who cares about this place is no longer here to care.