Undesired gagging due to a typo somewhere

Lately, like in the last few weeks, I noticed a lot of lines in the output window are missing various bits like words and spaces and things, and I realised that in every single case, the missing part is prefixed by a < (&lt;) and parts after that will return with a > (&gt;).

Example:
SAY Hi, Daniel. Please type THINK <message>.
> Daniel says, "Hi, Daniel. Please type THINK .

SAY This is the opening < of a tag.
> Daniel says, "This is the opening


When I realised the missing parts were encapsulated in angle-brackets, I figured something must be up in the MCL file itself, where a quotation mark or an unclosed trigger might be occurring, but I'm finding it very difficult to track it down, simply due to the sheer size of the file.

I did try disabling all the triggers and plugins and nothing happened.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to search the MCL file for some unclosed tag or quotation-mark anomaly? I'd hate to have to copy everything over to a new world file one object at a time..but if it comes to that, I guess I'll have to.

If it helps, I'm using Textpad for my manual editing.
Thanks.
-Daniel

It's nothing to do with the MCL file - you have MXP or Pueblo turned on, and the MUD is not properly escaping the < character. If you turn on the MXP debugging in the MXP tab to "show errors" you will see a heap of messages appearing about "unknown tag <message>" and so on.

You could ask the MUD to change things like <message> to &lt;message&gt; but they will probably reply "but it works with zMUD".

I seem to recall writing a plugin a while back that converted unknown MXP tags (eg. <message>) to &lt;message&gt; in the input stream, but can't find it right now.

I'm not at my PC right now, but maybe someone who is can write a small plugin that detects <...> and looks up if the ... is in the known list of tags. This won't work for server-defined tags, not sure how to handle that exactly.

Of course, the simple solution is to turn MXP off. In fact if the MUD doesn't support it, you may have just turned it on by mistake.

If it does, it doesn't support it very well, and you may be better off disabling the MXP option, at least then you will see all of your messages.

Awesome! Turned it off both here and on the server, as they have a config option for it (Achaea).

This is VERY interesting though. A couple days ago I bugged their MXP system (which they just recently integrated within the last something like two months), saying that their exits weren't being converted to send links, even though all but one of the config messages were saying I had turned it on.

Of course, I never use it anyhow, so it's really no loss to turn it off.

Cool though! I'm really happy it was not me! Heh.

Edit:
Note to Achaea users: if the subdivision system has been acting funky on you, this is also the cause. By using this fix, it now is back to normal. Also applies to the in-game ascii maps doing stuff.

Someone like the IEEE should standardise the whole MXP/Pueblo 'thing.' Too many options and alternatives it seems...

Achaea should be fine normally, but they do have a bug concerning the CONFIG option. Sometimes you need to give it a nudge. If CONFIG MXP already shows as ON, turn it OFF and then ON again. It's been noticed elsewhere too, and I'm sure it's been reported.

EDIT: That goes the other way, too. If it's OFF and you're getting MXP stuff, turn it ON then OFF again.