About MCiOS

This site is a place to play Mornington Crescent and other games which may or may not be based on those played on the BBC Radio 4 programme I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue.

The style of play emulates Rob Bunting's original Mornington Crescent server at York, which existed from, as nearly as I have been able to discover, approximately Jan/Feb 1995 until late in March, 1999. (A static recreation lives here.) In fact the only reason this site exists at all is because one day in 1998 Rob announced he'd be graduating, and the York server would presumably fall down from neglect sometime thereafter, so I hastily hacked this thing together as a replacement. With characteristic treachery, Rob then proceeded to stay on for another year. It's also worth noting, with complete irrelevance, that Rob is entirely unable to keep both feet on the ground at the same time. There is copious photographic evidence to support this.

The clock keeps MCST: Mornington Crescent Station Time, i.e. UK time. If it has a practical purpose, it's for reference against the latest posting times. Or perhaps to work out if people are likely to be awake there. I'm occasionally asked why it doesn't show the visitor's own time, but I've yet to see a desktop that doesn't already have a time display.

Why "in Outer Space"? No reason at all. It was just something random-ish to type between the <title> tags very early on, and it stayed that way until launch so we're stuck with it.

Entering Moves or Comments

The web being what it is nowadays, it's no longer reasonable or practical to host an unsecured website: it will quickly fill up with spam, poorly thought out political opinions, and even more poorly thought out cake recipes.

So for a number of years it's been necessary to validate users the first time they post. We do this by asking you to provide a well-known word or phrase in the small unlabeled text field next to the posting buttons. What you need to type may change from time to time; you'll get a hint when you attempt to post.

The hint assumes that you have some familiarity with the game or with ISIHAC generally. If you don't know the answer, it's reasonable to wonder why you're posting to a Mornington Crescent server. But if you've read this far, don't be put off, the answer won't be hard to discover. Try asking someone who listens to the show.

Formatting moves

Players normally use a small amount of HTML markup for emphasis and for distinguishing moves from the surrounding conversation. The most useful tag to know is bold, which is used like this:

<b>This text will appear in bold.</b>

In particular, a winning move must appear in some kind of markup if it is to be recognized by the server.

In addition to the standard HTML markup, the site supports a nonstandard hide tag. This is typically used in conversation to avoid spoilers. The text <hide>This text is hidden</hide> is replaced by a graphic: This text is hidden Move the mouse pointer over it to see the text.

Winning

It's well beyond the scope of this document to describe the conditions in which it's possible to win a game; however, assuming you're in a position to do so, you can win the game by entering the winning move in HTML markup -- again, bold is usually used. If the winning move is not given by the game's creator in its introduction, it's probably the standard: <b>Mornington Crescent</b>. If you're not sure, you can view the source of the page, where the winning move will be shown in comments near the game's title.

Note that some games are 'permanent' and can't be ended this way.

Game limits

The server limits the number of games which can be active at any given time: this is not because of any technical constraint, it's just to encourage the completion of games rather than allow slow-moving or moribund games to accumulate. It's still possible to contribute to games that have ended, with the exception of a few which have been closed for some reason which presumably made sense at some point.

Games which have recently ended or recently had moves or comments added to them continue to be displayed in the finished games section on the front page for about four days (more precisely, until midnight on the fourth day) after the last move or comment is entered. It's not uncommon for finished games to carry on "below the line", sometimes for a very long time.

When a win is challenged the game may be reinstated, beit by acclamation or consensus or whatever; when this occurs and a new game was created during the interval, this can result in the limit being exceeded. This isn't considered a problem, though it does mean that more than one game will have to end before any new game can be created.

Real-time chat

In addition to the "permanent" chat game, there is a live chat page which operates in real time. This was of course a much more interesting thing long ago, before group chat became first ubiquitous, then compulsory.

The number in parentheses next to the chat link on the main page shows how many chatters were present in the default chat room when the page was loaded. Hover your mouse pointer over the number to see a list of the names they're using.

Channels

When you connect to the chat server, by default you'll be talking on an unlabeled channel called 'mcios'. You can create a custom channel by providing a channel name argument in the URL, thus: https://parslow.com/mcchat/?channel=toast. If the channel already exists, you'll join that conversation in progress; if it doesn't it will be created. Channels are created on demand and destroyed when the last participant leaves.

Er, beg pardon, but I don't see anyone in here but me. Is it working?

If you type a comment and it appears in the chat window, it's working. So if you don't see anyone else, it just means you're all on your ownsome.

Oi matey, why was I disconnected?

Eterna-Lurk™ isn't supported, for historic reasons. If there's no activity of any kind on your connection for 24 hours, it'll be dropped. If you or anyone else in your chat says something, or if anyone enters or leaves, that resets the clock, so it's easy enough to keep the connection alive.

What's to stop someone from pretending to be me?

Improbable as it seems now, there were in fact a few incidents of impersonation back in the early days. If you're concerned about it, email me at the link on the front page and we'll set up an "alias": tell me your name as you want it to appear, and a secret word or short phrase you want to type in its place. This will have the effect of A) reserving your preferred name; it will no longer be possible for anyone to connect using it; and B) allowing you to connect using the alias you've chosen. No one will see it, instead they'll see your preferred name. Note this feature is only available for chat, not the web game forum.

Server information

MCiOS consists mostly of three ruinously crude, dawn-of-the-web grade Perl CGI scripts, and beneath a decade or two of feature creep is essentially unchanged since 1998.

The live chat server was written in Python in 2001, along with a client based on Flash/XMLSockets. It was rewritten in 2013 to support a pure HTML/WebSocket client, and again from scratch in Rust approximately this morning, for various reasons -- incidentally reducing its memory footprint by, without exaggeration, 95 percent.

The original York server was bash scripts; the recreation linked on the front page is Python ASGI using the Quart framework. Or rather it was: serving a static memorial website using a framework that takes up >40MB of resident memory is a bit silly; so what's presently being served is a static copy produced by spidering that.

The site is hosted somewhere on the Laurentian Shield, and runs on both Void Linux and Alpine Linux, somehow.

The Lure of the Underground poster by Alfred Leete, 1927. It is my belief that this image entered the public domain at the end of 2003. Will be removed if information to the contrary is presented.