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There are rooms but without directions, because they can be arbitrarily connected to each other by doors! Fun fact, rooms USED to connect only directionally because at the time I think they were implemented as linked lists. But now, it's arbitrary and you can do hidden passageways and shortcuts and cool little things like that.
The wiki is very, very out of date and it's something that's undergoing an overhaul (when Dan can get time to do so).
Player-owned places are fairly straightforward to learn once you're in there, but the drag-and-drop is a reference to the programming aspects of a place. They're mostly conditional things, like being able to display different descriptions for different times of day... but they go all the way up to being able to set up logic chains sufficient to set variables based on past events, displaying different things depending on what room a player came into a given room from... there's a lot of depth to it that I've never mucked with.
I'm heavily biased, having been an avid player of the game for ages. It's got a very distinct style, and I can definitely see how it's changed over the years, but I quite like it. The world that's been built in it is a delightfully quirky and fun one, but the writing also delves into some interesting territory both in darkness and in philosophy.
I'm also somewhat biased because one of the most well-fleshed out stories hits a nerve for me in how it confronts the horror of the loss of one's identity, enough that I can't comfortably read it. I say that in an absolutely positive way, much like a horror movie might be so unnerving that I can't bear to watch the whole thing.
It's generally light-hearted, with some dark humor, odd humor and silly humor, and I highly recommend giving it a go. Meet the community! Discover the setting,! Fight your own tongue, an ambulatory pair of pants, your past self, and a Panthzer (50% jungle panther, 50% Panzer tank, don't ask questions)!
Poke your head into Banter sometime! I'm almost the exact opposite, having barely touched the mechanical side of the game in ages, and I always like to say hi to other players. Especially if they've been around and love the setting!
Hundreds of thousands of words, and that's not counting the fantastic roleplay community and the places that they've built.
Some of which have programming.
Some of THOSE have created miniature games inside of those places, complete with events, character statistics, and a character creator. I've been on this site for ten years and never come close to that level of creative madness, and I will always deeply respect those loveable maniacs.
It's kind of got MUD energy to it from my understanding, but it's purely browser-based. There's a whole game to it, but the draw for me is the roleplay and the player-built places.
EXACTLY.
The game used to have one rule: "Don't be a dick."
The game used to pride itself on having banned fewer players than the number of players who met and got married in real life.
Eventually the community realized that wasn't a good thing. If you've banned almost nobody, it doesn't mean that everyone in your community is being nice and wonderful and not harming anyone else, it means that you've only been told about the most egregious and obvious cases.
It means a dozen different cliques can decide for themselves on how people "ought to" interact and play.
A big CoC doesn't mean everyone's a judgmental lawyer. Traffic codes in the US have thousand and thousands of words for different edge cases. But it doesn't mean everyone goes around with a camera and a lawyer in their backseat, people generally understand "hey don't speed and don't run red lights and don't drive drunk".
Improbable island used to have more or less only one rule, outside of "underage shit will get you reported to your ISP", and that was "don't be a dick". It worked well, on the surface, but as the CoC says, there were a lot of issues that cropped up that went mostly unnoticed, even as they were impacting a surprising number of players.
I prefer the new CoC. Lists of rules are never something that someone will regularly reference. You'll read through it once, get an understanding of the ground rules and community expectations, and then fit into the community and get up to speed by experience. Sometimes, people make mistakes, and someone can say "hey, maybe don't do that, Code of Conduct has a bit about that", and that someone can go "ah crud, thanks".
It has player-owned places that are done with a fairly clunky interface, but the focus is far more on the writing that you put into your place. It's a callback to the MUDs of old, to my understanding.
I think the record for a group-written player-made place was something on the order of tens of thousands of words.