[Justin534]

Exactly, the actual values themselves wouldn't necessarily be visible to the end-user. Instead, like you said the site could use an algorithm to convert the more or less analog data into a discrete category more meaningful to the user - i.e. low, medium, high fantasy. But, in the background there would still exist a gradient derived from votes. I think this would be particularly useful as MU*s have the tendency to change over time.

Using strictly fantasy as an example. From a player's perspective they could vote the MU* either Low Fantasy Setting, Medium Fantasy Setting, High Fantasy Setting. A tooltip could be displayed when they hover their mouse over each vote option to describe each option. Then behind the scenes Low Fantasy could evaluate to a value of 0, Medium 5, and High Fantasy 10. Lets say 15 people voted: 8 for Low fantasy, 5 for Medium, and 2 for high. If you add everything together you have (0*8) + (5*5) + (10*2) = 45. If you then took a simple average (Total Value/Num. of Votes Cast) = (45 / 15 ) = 3. So, in this case the Fantasy gradient value would be 3. Behind the scenes the algorithm could convert any value between 0 and 3.33333 as Low Fantasy, between 3.33334 and 6.66666 as Medium Fantasy, and between 6.6667 and 10 as High Fantasy.

So in this example a gradient value of 3 would be evaluated to Low Fantasy in the directory. I also imagined people would be able to comment under each attribute... so on the site / directory not only would the degree of fantasy be searchable in this manner, but players could also leave comments in regards to each attribute, allowing users to see in words what players have to say about the fantasy setting, along with the tallied results of whether its viewed as Low, Medium, High, etc. This same mechanism would also be equally applied to other attributes, for example, Permanent Death - perhaps it ranks 9.2, which lets say evaluates to 'MUD has permanent death system implemented' Player's could comment on the attribute with the ability to say something like: "The MUD features permanent death for the most part, except there are a few rare occasions when a character might be revived ICly such as A, B, or C."

Anyways, these were some ideas floating around in my head in regards to how a search/directory site could categorize MU*s, one of the major advantages being that as MUD changes/evolves so does its categorization. I also owe some credit to a poster in the other thread who help me to rethink some of my original voting ideas.