[Threshold]

I checked out TMC's forums because of this thread, and honestly, they seem pretty dead to me as well.

If players are going to participate in a MUD forum, it is going to be a forum hosted by their MUD for discussions about their MUD. They aren't going to go to some general MUD site just to wallow in arcane discussions of game design and theory. That just won't interest most players.

Most people in games don't even participate in forums for their own game. I remember a few years back WoW released some data indicating that an exceptionally low percentage (I believe it was low single digits) of their players read the forums even once a month. In my own experience from reading WoW's forums, after a while I recognized a lot of the names of the posters, which speaks volumes considering that is a community of millions. That means very few people were actually posting.

Threshold's forums get hundreds of posts per day, and our community is not gigantic. We get significantly more traffic than TMC and TMS put together. I don't think this is anything special. I imagine the same is true for just about any MUD with a decent sized player base.

I think the only way to get players posting on TMS would be if you took the suggestion someone gave and let MUD admins have a sub-forum for their mud. Make them the moderator of it, and let them have up to 2-3 categories. Then you'll get people coming here to post about THEIR MUD with people from THEIR MUD. Then perhaps they'll browse over to some of the more general categories.

You aren't going to get players coming here to discuss general mud concepts. They just don't care enough. Most players just want to play and have fun... they don't want to analyze why they are or are not having fun.