Two questions.

I noticed there are 7,000 + "out" clicks in the top 20. Could there really be that much investigating into other MUDs going on, assuming most voters are at the site to support their own MUD? If these links aren't from investigators checking out a different MUD, where are they from? Are the numbers real?

Also, is it *smart* for operators of smaller MUDs that end up buried in the 40-100+ part of the list to encourage their players to come here day after day after day, to be presented with the top 20 list of MUDs which are far more popular than their own?

I use a third party web stats program, and what TMS shows as OUTs my web stats agree 100%.

We are still in development, and for the first few months were at the bottom(with only a couple people voting). Those votes brought us a couple more people, maybe one of them started voting too... now we hold stead at 27th.

So far, for the month of June(which I only installed these stats after the first week, so not 100% accurate) TMS(forums included) count for 14.51% of our traffic. I'd say it's very much worth it.

One thing I've noticed about the muds at the bottom, is that they have LESS votes than should be possible. You can vote twice a day, and it resets every 15 days. That means at minimum a mud should have 30 votes at the end of a cycle, but I have seen some that don't make that. That means the owner isn't voting twice a day, if the owner doesn't bother to vote how can they expect their players to? Just my personal thoughts on that, not to be taken as an insult to anyone.

I think a lot of muds don't like to hassle their players to vote over open channels, or set up scripts to remind them in their prompts every 10 hours and so on, which the ones at the top of the list do.

Most players don't vote on their own accord, without being constantly prompted. And if the owners don't urge their players to vote, why would they bother to vote twice a day themselves? They probably just added their Mud to the list, feel that the votes are useless, since they don't really prove anything, and consequently don't bother.

You are probably right, just like life you get out of TMS what you put in, heh.

We don't have a game for people to be reminded with, but we did write a vote reminder for our forums. I think 17 people voluntarily turned it on.

So the one person raised you from the bottom to 27th?

Do you think that's new traffic, though? I have to wonder if the large majority of the 'out' hits are people who just voted for their MUD and are going back to their MUD's website. It seems very unlikely to me that there would be tens of thousands of investigations into other MUDs over the course of each voting session (sure, there's some--but so much?).

I still question the wisdom of small MUDs sending their players here to vote, and day after day after day having those players presented with the top 20 MUDs.

Ryan and I voting, then as more people heard of us a few more started voting. That's what raised us up in the rankings.

If those OUT votes were from people that have already been to my site, my web stats would not be recording them as unique hits. Of course some people could vote and go back to their own mud (and TMS would record that as an OUT I assume), but my web stat progs claim they are unique hits coming from here. I trust what the web stat progs tell me, and I use two different ones that both give me the same stats.

Clandestine MUD's voting system has been in place for a month now, and we have found that the hits-back to our site also appear to be unique, according to our recording systems. It is true that some of those hits are from our own players, but the sheer volume of hits back(we've been consistantly ranked 2nd-to-4th in most-hits-back to our site) has indeed aided our playerbase greatly in a short period of time. I would say that the OUT hits are a good indication of howmuch you are gaining from TMS' voting system. The time this becomes less true, perhaps, is when you have a larger playerbase with more people "clicking back" from your base to vote for their own MUD.

The ratio of your playerbase-size to OUTbound clicks seems to be a good indication, though, from my experience within the past month.

Where is the most-hits-back ranking list?

There is no list, though there could be. I merely scan through the list of the top 40 and find the most OUT votes and rank them.

I write with a fair degree of certainty when I say that it was a small-ish group of people, who told thier friends, put links in a few places, and then mentioned they should vote if they liked what they saw. I noticed the position and total forum members skyrocket.

And yes, it's totally worth it to have MUDs below the top 20's. Some of us look at the second or third pages as well.

However, some of the final pages are worthless, in my opinion. MUDs that have less than something like ten votes or so will never recieve a click from me, because at some point, the votes are so low that you know even the head builder/coder/god/whatever isn't voting.