[Lasher]

Thanks for the insights Isildur, and absolutely not taken as a "knock" of any kind. You phrased my original question better than I did - there is no doubt that each MUD has a community, but is there really a "community" at the macro level? Is the shortage of activity a symptom of this site, or a symptom of MUDs in general? By definition each MUD is a silo that will develop it's path independently of others.

Most traffic to TMC is one of two kinds:

1. A player came to vote for their favorite MUD and may or may not stick around for a while to read a post/review/etc. Generally, someone coming to vote for their favorite MUD isn't in the market (right now) for a new MUD, but you hope your MUD somehow catches their attention (banners, rankings, forum posts, reviews, etc) then maybe they'll check you out later.

2. After Wikipedia, which ranks #1 for pretty much everything informational, TMC and TMS rank #1 and #2 for the phrases "MUD" and "MUDS" in Google. The other type of traffic is people interested in MUDs following those links and other links to TMS from various sites coming to learn more about MUDs, browse the database, read some reviews and maybe try a MUD out. I think we could do more to help these folks out with general information on MUDs, what the classifications really mean and, as Brody suggested, this is where a revived articles area could be a big help.

Most of the traffic is not active MUD players coming to discuss MUDs in general, because they don't care about MUDs in general, they only care about the MUD they play - until some time in the future when they might be interested in a new MUD for whatever reason. MUD Admins tend to care more about the kind of issues that affect MUDs at a global level and, if anything, that is why TMS is more aimed towards Admins. It would be interesting to hear if this was by design right from the start or if it just turned out that way - but I don't think Adam is around even lurking anymore...