I haven't seen one of these in ages, do these still even exist on the Server?

I hope there are, I really liked bumping into these things occasionally. So if there aren't, I reckon just file this under Suggestions. ;)

I think they're not as common anymore.

I know that I don't really bother with them. Part of the motivation for them was no Euro DM... You've got me now!

The thing is that to make them challenging to find, you have to put them in very rarely visited areas since everyone knows a lot of the module's Underdark areas well now, which means it's most likely that they'll never be found and you'd wasted X amount of time setting it up.

There was also a lot of problems with people finding them and getting wiped out since no DM was around to manage the encounters.

There's definitely pros and cons to these.

I try to set up a few of these every so often before I go to sleep, to keep people on their feet during off-peak hours.

Incidentally, if you have good ideas for simple DM-free quests that I can easily set up on the fly (i.e. no special scripting), please send them to me!

I've pretty much stopped doing these. I had several reasons for this.

Parties that were too low a level would get wiped out. Parties too high just rolled over it. People would go invis or stealth and steal any loot.

I do sometimes set up DM quests this way from time to time though. I stick random areas around, and have quests that I monitor ready for anyone who stumbles accross them. Typically, I set up 4 areas, and get one quest out of it.

For me it's mostly an issue that most of them are never found, but when I get time to do some DM'ing again I'm sure I'll go back to occasionally making these areas.