-shrug- All reviews are now are ads. Write a bad review for a mediocre to terrible MUD, i.e. The Sea of Storms or Amaranth, and they'll get it removed, regardless of how fair or unbiased the review was.

While I've seen some reviews not removed, the MUD admin only need to set up a tremendous whine in order to get them removed. I've given up reviewing in general of late.

-D

Its kind of a weird topic. While I haven't witnessed it myself, what Dulan said could certainly be true, even though on the page where you actually writ a review, it says that bad reviews are ok as long as you back up what you say, like, um...

Good:
This mud sux0rz, I played a week, saw 20 players and 5 imms, NONE of them would help me find the newbie school, they just say to find it yourself. There wasn't a single map either and barely any help files. (add something else here)

Bad:
This mud is terrible, I hate it and you shouldn't even try it.

If the mud admins are able to get reviews removed, they should only be able to demand it on reviews that fit the "bad" criteria.

Now Realedazed, I certainly believe that there is a conspiracy for imms\owner to make a slew of good reviews to get more players, and the only thing I can object to that you mentioned is that "one review said there was a very large playerbase, but the mud was completely empty at times" You might have been on at a bad time, heh...

If you're a regular complainer on a mud and then suddenly there's a bad review, the owner might see it fit to punish your honesty...hmm...Terloch...;)

So there's fear of punishment, conspiracies, and corruption in the topmudsites side of things. If the person(s) that handled review checking would immediately ditch the "bad" reviews and leave the "good" ones put no matter how much of a tremendous whine the owner puts up.

"And that's all I have to say about that!" -2

This isn't something new. Reviews are used by many to
"promote" their MUD.

The same can also be said of several of the people who
seem to post on every subject here - with by-lines on
how great their MUD is.

I think it goes without saying that everyone should take
reviews as one persons take on a particular subject -
just like we do reviews for movies.

If you play a MUD and agree or disagree with a review
right up a good review to counter of promote the
previous review. This is the only way we can stop
the spam reviews being used as advertisement.

-C...