There are some points of etiquette and pieces of advice that, if followed, will make your life on the MUCK a lot more pleasant. Probably the best general advice is that you should remember that you are dealing with people, regardless of what they look like. Be polite. Be respectful unless you have been given a specific reason not to be. Remember that you always have the option of going elsewhere, or leaving the MUCK entirely. What's below is influenced a lot by FurryMUCK, but applies everywhere.

Remember that the MUCK isn't a democracy. The wizcorp owns and runs it, and they have the final say in everything. If you do not like their policies, find a MUCK run by people who you like better. Don't make the mistake, though, of thinking that the wizzes are heavy-handed. Often their rules are phrased bluntly because of the rules-lawyers out there who continuously try to weasel around the rules using loopholes in the wording, or they were in response to the ( fortunately very small ) group that literally does nothing except whine about how unfair the wizzes are because they won't do exactly what this group wants them to. For the most part, if you are reasonable and polite and don't try to push the outer edges of the rules, you will never run into any problems with the wizzes. If they do ask you to stop doing something, don't whine about how you ought to be allowed to do it or start harping about how the wizzes won't let you do anything because they won't let you do that one thing. Accept their request politely and abide by it, or have your character toaded and go elsewhere.

In public areas, feel free to join in the general conversation. If you keep quiet, it's likely people will either not notice you or not go to great efforts to drag you into the flow of things. Don't, however, butt into private conversations merely on a whim, any more than you would insert yourself into a private conversation between two people in the hall at work or at any other gathering.

Try to fit into the general atmosphere of the area. Don't bring egregious role-playing into primarily social areas. Don't be blatantly out-of-character in an area that's primarily for in-character activity. Don't go into FurrySpace and then complain about all the science-fiction and futuristic trappings. Don't go to the Willing Victim's Guild and complain about non-consentual activities. Don't go to Dover's and complain about excessive amounts of sex. Don't go to the West Corner of the Park with an explicitly sexual or naked description and whine about the lack of sex and the people telling you to clean up your description.

Try not to be excessively annoying. Constantly babbling about unrelated topics, making bad jokes constantly, dragging people into things they don't want to be involved in and otherwise making a fool of yourself is not going to endear you to the majority of the MUCK residents. In particular, don't engage in powergaming. This is a term used to refer to telling others what they do rather than letting them respond to what you do. The canonical example would be "X pulls out a gun and blows Y's head off. Y falls over dead.". X is forcing Y to do something. The problem is that Y isn't bound by what X said, so the likely response would be "Y sidesteps the bullet and ignores X.". If you want to do something along these lines, it's better to phrase it as "X pulls out a gun and fires a shot at Y's head.", and let Y decide whether to be hit or dodge. Powergaming also shows up in descriptions, where the writer of the desc states in it how the looker responds to the description or the character being described.

Try not to indulge in what I term "public mental masturbation". Some characters have several puppets that they can make say and do things. They will bring those puppets into a public area and engage in extensive interaction with their own puppets because all of the real people in the area are ignoring them. Every time I have seen this, everyone is ignoring the character because they are rude, ignorant and/or generally annoying to be around. If you find that you are spending more time talking to your own puppets or alternate characters than with anyone else, take some time off and do some serious thinking about yourself and how you're coming across to everyone else.

If you are trying to find someone, the whereis and page commands are available. If you need to talk privately to someone, the page and whisper commands are available. Make use of these commands in reasonable ways. If you don't know someone, for example, don't go pageing them just to prove you can or to make a pointless joke. If you have an honest question and reason to believe they can answer it, or some other legitimate reason to talk to them, say what it is and why you're bringing it to them when you page them. If they can see why you paged them right off, they're much more likely to provide a useful response instead of just telling you to buzz off. Similarly, whispers should be used for legitimately private conversations, not just to bug people.

If someone is ignoring your pages or whispers or tells you not to bother them, don't take it incredibly personally. They may be involved in conversations or role-playing and simply not want to be interrupted at the moment. They may simply have set the ignore flag for some reason and forgotten to turn it off. Don't keep pestering them, let it go and try again later. If they don't want to talk to you at all, under any circumstances, accept it philosophically and find someone else to talk to.

Don't go around randomly hugging, kissing or doing other things to people you don't know at all. Some don't mind it, some mind it terribly, but in all cases it marks you as a rude git. It's fine to be friendly, and encouraged, but find out if someone is interested before getting physical or intimate with them. In real life you don't normally treat complete strangers the same way you treat people you've been friends with for years, apply the same principles to the MUCK. Remember that some people just may not want to be hugged in public, even by old friends. It's their right to be that way, don't get huffy about it.

Don't go around grabbing items belonging to other people. Often you can, but it's considered impolite at best. This is not a competition to see how much junk you can accumulate.

On most MUCKs, there is a group often referred to as the helpstaff. On FurryMUCK, you can get a listing of the helpstaff currently logged in by using the helpstaff command. If you have questions, the first thing to do is try to dig up the information on your own. If that fails, talk to a helpstaffer. Lay out exactly what your question is and what you've already done to find the answer. The more you've done on your own, the better they'll think of you.

If you want help on setting up something to force other players to do things, or to do things to them whether they want them done or not, be prepared for an uphill battle. The only place they'll even consider this legitimate is in a role-playing environment when the people affected know about it and agree to it beforehand. Under any other circumstances, the best you will get is a stern admonition not to do that. If you ignore the admonition and do it anyway ( as at least one player I know of has, by creating a gun that, when fired at a player, sent them to their home without warning and without their permission ) you can expect unfriendly attention from the wizzes.

If you have problems with another player, there are some things you can do about it:

1. Try to avoid attracting certain types of attention. If you don't want to talk computer talk, don't set computer-related whatis flags, for example.
2. Tell the other person privately to quit bothering you. Be explicit about what they are doing that's causing the problem, but try not to be unavoidably rude about it.
3. If they persist, try ignoring them. You can page #ignore and whisper #ignore an individual to keep them from talking to you privately. You can banish them from areas you control. Various options to the whereis and whereare commands can be used to keep people from finding out where you are. Most MUCK clients can be set to filter out text from individuals, eg. TinyFugue provides the /GAG command. Use this capability to make the person in question disappear from your screen.
4. If it's a private area, do an ex here to determine who owns it. Talk to them about the problem, and see if they are willing to do anything about it. Note that they may not be willing, for one reason or another. If you can't tolerate the situation and they aren't willing to help, don't return to their area.
5. In extreme cases, when previous methods have failed and the person bothering you won't quit and keeps tracking you down, file a complaint with the wizzes about them. Have logs of what the person has done, and what you've done to try and mitigate the problem. Don't get emotional about it, the more level-headed and factual you are the more likely the wizzes are to conclude that you have a legitimate complaint. Do give the wizzes time to take action, they are not likely to be able to do anything in just a few minutes or hours. Don't expect miracles, they are unlikely to kick someone off for a first offense.
6. As a last resort, leave the MUCK. Yes, you may have friends there. You're just going to have to decide which is more important, keeping in contact with them or getting shut of a problem. Sorry, that's life.