On Usenet, there is a lively community of interactive fiction designers and aficionados communicating on rec.arts.int-fiction (RAIF). The messages in most newsgroups vanish shortly after they are posted; however, thanks to Volker Blasius the messages on RAIF are archived at ftp.gmd.de. Stephen van Egmond has placed these messages on several web pages.
Unfortunately, that's still several thousand messages to wade through to find a topic of interest. Although RAIF tends to have a higher ratio of discussions to fluff than many other Usenet groups, there are still many threads which do not bear directly, or even indirectly, on game design.
To make this veritable flood of information more manageable, I have gone through the messages and picked out the topics I found of interest.
I have divided messages I found useful into seven topics. Clicking on a topic below will take you to a list of messages/threads that have to do with that topic, along with a tiny blurb about one.
Clicking on a given thread takes you to the first message in that thread. At the bottom of each message is a list of responses to that message. Choose a response and you're on your way. When you're done with the response, either back up to read another response, or (if available) read the response to the response. This is one way of navigating through a particular thread.
This method of thread navigation has a disadvantage, however. Often the program Stephen used to webify the messages couldn't tell if a message was its own topic or a followup. Followups become separated from the original message in these cases. To find these orphans, click on "Thread Index" at the bottom of any message you're reading. It will take you to a list of all the threads. From the thread index you can see all messages posted; usually, the messages in a thread are grouped together, even if the program wasn't sure that they were related. By judicious use of the thread index, you can find all messages in a current thread.