Crystal Palace (chat site)
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Crystal Palace, also known as CP or Palace is perhaps one of the most popular telnet-based talkers in the short history of talkers. Crystal Palace is geared for adult audiences interested in roleplaying bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism with other consenting adults. It is currently headed by Virus and has existed since 1996. It still exists today and has a thriving user base, having survived an onslaught of controversy, other chats, and the advent of instant messengers. It is located at telnet://talker.com:9900.
Note: There have been other talkers named Crystal Palace, some designed for users of all ages. They are not affiliated with this Crystal Palace. This talker is also in no way affiliated with the English football team Crystal Palace F.C., nor indeed Crystal Palace (park and gardens) in South London after which the football team is named.
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[edit] About Crystal Palace
Crystal Palace is a BDSM-style telnet-based age-restricted talker that caters for dominative, submissive, switches and vanilla style sexual preferences. Several thousand unique accounts have been created throughout the talker's history, suggesting that a rather large number of people have called Crystal Palace their talker home at some point. On entry, a user picks Dominant, Switch, Submissive, or Vanilla to demonstrate both their sexual interests as well as how they will be treated and what they can do to each other. Dominants can buy Switches and Submissives as slaves, and control them to do their bidding. Using the talker, people earn credits, and they can buy tools, slaves, bid at auctions or play games with their "money". It thus becomes both a talker and almost like a MUD at the same time. Vanillas may not participate in the games to the same extent as others. Submissives also have all lower case names, and many commands are taken from them. Submissives can still buy things though.
Crystal Palace has a collection of users that keep the peace - these are called wizards. New wizards are nominated by users and voted on by existing staff members. Major administrative changes, although very infrequent, are carried out by the owner of the palace, Virus.
[edit] History
Crystal Palace was initially written based on NUTS 3, but did not open its doors for 6 months while coding was fine-tuned. All of the coding was done by Virus, the owner and co-creator of Crystal Palace. From the moment that Crystal Palace was opened, its code was known as Acorn 1.0, a play on the NUTS acronymn. Anticipation for the talker's creation had been high, and over the 6 months that the talker was being created, many snippets were shown to potential users to try to hint to them what it would be about. Over time, the Acorn and its NUTS base was not sufficient for the Palace's needs, so a new code base was written from the ground up by Virus named Exile.
[edit] Worlds of Syrius
In late 1997, 2 other BDSM talkers were added to Crystal Palace to form a kind of "Multiple Worlds", which was called "Worlds of Syrius", named after Syrius - an acronymn for Sydb, Eris, and Virus, the three main people that created Crystal Palace. These other two talkers were called Black Jade and Lo Riviero. However, these separated from Crystal Palace in 1997 and became independent. They never truly operated as multiple worlds in the same sense as lintilla-style multiple worlds talkers operated, and acted as if they were their own talkers. They eventually lost most of their users due to the non-connected nature and because the bulk of the users were primarily using the more popular Crystal Palace.
[edit] Uniqueness
Crystal Palace was among the first talkers to combine the ease of use of traditional talkers with the interactive nature of MUDS. The innovative command system and credit economy allowed users to easily interact both in a social and roleplaying atmosphere. Users accumulated credits by roleplaying and those credits could be spent in a roleplaying manner. This encouraged users to help contribute to the overall atmosphere of the Palace, which was one of the primary attractions. Users were able to roleplay in a comfortable environment. Roleplaying was one of the main drivers behind Crystal Palace's success.
[edit] Controversy
Crystal Palace has endured several instances of controversy throughout its history. Allegations included spying on users, hacking servers, giving private information to police, and even colluding with other talkers to thwart competition. Such allegations are not uncommon in an environment ruled by ad hoc administrative structures resembling a combination of feudalism and anarchy, as several talkers were often governed. Because of the seemingly unsecure environment in which one's privacy was never guaranteed, many people abandoned talkers in favor of the more popular commercially-sponsored chat rooms and instant messengers. However, Crystal Palace is still a popular place even today, with an average of 50 concurrent users at its peak connection time [1]. The talker claims to have over 2,000 active accounts at this time and tens of thousands of unique accounts have been created over its lifetime.
