Star Trek Entertainment Clubs Online (STECO) was a chat based Star Trek sim club on the Classic Prodigy Online service that existed at various times during 1995 and 1996 and was run by Admiral Rick Berman.
STECO's most successful incarnation was during the spring and summer of 1996, which was the third time Admiral Rick attempted to run STECO (hence the term "clubs" in the title to signify the multiple attempts).
All incarnations of the club centered on the USS Roddenberry-C, a Federation Starship set in the 25th century where the Federation had been destroyed by the Romulans and the Roddenberry had escaped to fight with the resistance on Bajor. The main problem with the ship and club was that Admiral Rick could only stay online for half an hour a night, so he ran the sim on multiple nights and demanded that the crew attend each night.
This worked for a little while, the sims were entertaining and the crew did their best to keep everyone informed of what they missed if they couldn't make a particular night, and over the summer of 1996 the sim expanded to three nights in a row. In addition, the club ran a successful Star Trek trivia session.
However, as the months progressed, the story lines became more complicated and people drifted away from the sim. To compensate, Admiral Rick cracked down, began to remove people for missing sims, took control of peoples characters, and began to turn the sims into script readings so everyone stayed on the story he wanted to see.
By August 1996 the third incarnation of the club, which began in May, was teetering on collapse. Two of STECO's Vice Presidents, Chas Hammer and Julie Ryse, worked to formulate a plan to save the club. It called for the club to establish independent sims for each day one was held (and not have the Roddenberry sim on each day), to give captains creative control over the sims, to give simmers creative control over their characters, to require ship logs and a club newsletter to keep everyone up to date, and to provide every new member with a club guidebook. However, before the plan could be presented to Admiral Rick, STECO collapsed as the few final members quit the club.
Chas and Julie instead decided to start up Trek Online, and applied their plans to the new club.
Admiral Rick attempted to launch a fourth incarnation of STECO in the late fall of 1996, but was unsuccessful.