[mfontani]

Unfortunately many older mud servers (diku? Rom?) started with the wrong \\n\\r and codebases spawned from them just continued. Very few send the proper \\r\\n

[JdeBP]

So yet another of many places where one just has to know that the RFC does not match the real world. An interesting test case for my state machine. But I can see the dragon in the proper colours, now.

[hombre_fatal]

Another minor thing you might run into is that servers don't reliably send DONT vs WONT and DO vs WILL when negotiating.

A server (or client) should send `IAC WILL <option>` to announce that it has a capability, and the other party will confirm/reject with DO or DONT.

But some servers will send `IAC DO <option>` even though they are announcing a capability (like server-to-client compression).

Telnet is fun and I like how simple it is. Kinda sad it's basically dead except for what feels like servers that nobody remembered to unplug.