Most of these have new players in mind:

1. Have "autoloot" default to "off".

2. Have color be "on" by default for skill improvements and affects expiration. The latter, in particular, would probably help new players.

3. Consider adding time of day to the default prompt. Or just run a query and see which items are most frequently used in custom prompts, then make them part of the default.

Also:

4. Advertise the "telnetga" command somewhere during the character creation process. I'd never know it existed if I hadn't seen Umiron's announcement; guessing a new player would have no idea.

I'll probably go ahead with some of this.

I'm torn on autoloot, as while 99% of people do turn it off, I still think having things go straight to the inventory vs. the ground is better in the case of an honest newbie. I suppose we could selectively turn that on only for people who indicate their newbieness during creation, though.

Also, time (%T) has been in the default prompt for quite some time.

What does telnetga do to clients that don't actually need it? If they behave the same, might turn that on by default.

I know way back in the day I opened a bug report w/ the tintin++ guys about the text "overwriting" (i.e. what you see when you don't have telnetga enabled) and they basically told me, "Sorry, your mud is broken."

So they, at least, seem to think "telnetga on" is the "correct" behavior for a mud.

CF doesn't do any Telnet negotiation and therefore has no idea what a client wants or can do. If a player enables "telnetga" then CF sends the "go ahead" option immediately following a prompt. What a given client does in response to that depends on the client, I guess.

The setting defaults to off because that was the original behavior and it made sense that something that might change how someone interacts with the MUD default to a no-op.

some clients have ####ty defaults and get confused. Others simply render it as a garbage character.

The server can't negotiate it either since there is no option for it to be negotiated in the telnet RFC. So, the correct behavior for a server is to offer it and allow the user to turn it on with a command.

There is a different option that some muds use to designate prompts, that
can actually be negotiated via the normal telnet negotiation protocol.
It's called EOR (end of record). CF doesn't support negotiations though so it's irrelevant.