I've recently been playing a dwarf and the detect secret passage skill has shown me how woefully inadequate I've been in fully exploring the game. I'm wondering if I'm just missing something command, syntax or process wise?

I modified an existing room description which does not contain a secret door to use as an example in what I would do and to ask for this advice:

SAMPLE:

The Remnants of a Store Room
The room is constructed of a dark stone and filled with cobwebs, long burnt out torches are still contained in sconces about the room. A door constructed of cedar stands in the west, while a window looks out over a mist filled courtyard to the east. The remains of wooden racks are in evidence as are broken shelving. The cobwebs which fill the room are absent around a curiously shaped space in the south wall. While the northern half of the room holds the remnants of shattered casks and barrels.

Exits: {south} west


My process here would be:

Look all
Look at keywords in the description - Stone, cobwebs, torches, sconces, cedar, door, racks, shelving, shelves, space, casks, barrels, secret, trapdoor, south, & include any other nouns found in the "look all" exit descriptions.
Try to open all of the above & any additional nouns found in the long descriptions for the items. (I use an open macro that I update with every secret door name I find)
Try to use all of the above keywords.
Gaze window
gaze east,
crawl east
crawl window
crawl south
If the south description doesnt say anything along the lines of. It's a trap, or if it does and I'm feeling lucky. I'll try to just move south.

Failing all of this to yield a way south, I'd step back a room or three and look for other items to use that could potentially open this door.

Should I be "looking" or "using" compound nouns ie "Stone door" "empty space"?

The help file for examine implies it is for character descriptions, does it at times display more information in room descriptions?

Are there other commands I've missed that can be used in room item interaction - Invoke?

Are there other 'generic' terms for secret doors that should always be used other than secret or trapdoor that it is assumed we just know to use when a door is not obvious? ie "Secretdoor" despite the grammatical error?

Your clues for what to poke around in should be in the room description itself and the subsequent object descriptions.

Some areas are better about this than others, older areas are helplessly frustrating in this regard, Basicilia, Mausoleum, and lots of areas around Arkham come to mind, as well as Ysigrath, Nonveil, Pyramid of Azhan and several others.

If you stick to the newer areas exploration should be fairly intuitive, but may God have mercy on your soul if you attempt to explore the Abandoned Mines, Sitran or older parts of the Underdark and Underdark Sea like it's a single player RPG and you're admiring the view. There simply aren't enough keywords where there should be and it makes finding anything independently such as preps, wand locations and keys, while not completely futile, take far, far longer than the author clearly intended. For example, there are spots in the areas southeast of Arkham that have some kind of damage reduction according to detect artifact but the room descs are so utterly terrible due to the age of the area that you have no hope of finding the appropriate keyword to examine without having someone show you who has played the game over 15 years.

Mortorn can be pretty bad in this regard too, but aside from all that the imms are slowly but surely working on this across the MUD, and it's clear they have been doing everything within their power to limit or reduce the sprawl of the MUD itself so that people have places to hide but finding PK's doesn't become the exclusive realm of air shifters, healers and conjurers. Areas have been almost exclusively revamps rather than additions the past three or four years.

If you *do* happen to find something that otherwise was virtually impossible to find, should be there but isn't, or something of that nature, there is always the typo command. There's no guarantee it won't get moved from that command to a punchlist for a future area revamp however.