There are bouncers for that. And better yet there are search engines, so you don’t need to stay all the time so you don’t miss content.

MUD is more like IRC-

MUD is basically a talker with a game.

There’s nothing like IRC+… Maybe, but just maybe, XMPP?

Sorry, i didn’t get the joke.

IRC is nice if there aren’t many people. Otherwise you get stuck in queue for downloading the file. That’s my biggest issue with it. I only use it as last resort.

emule is not slow. It’s really fast (with emule client). You just need to have high id. The lack of clients is an issue and amule although it works is crap (it’s really slow and the dev doesn’t acknowledge that - there’s some problem in the download queues…).

If you don’t want to use emule, use gnutella - namely gtk-gnutella. It supports magnet links (as long as they contain the bitprint hash), integrated search, windows, linux and mac, and it’s fast (since there’s no queue management, it depends on the uploader speed). The only problem is the lack of files being shared.

Or better yet, use shareaza. It supports bittorrent, emule, gnutella, g2 networks. There’s the problem of not being developed anymore (there are some forks, but they are mostly dead) and the bittorrent support is not the most up to date, so some trackers block it.