[Threshold]

I am interested to see what you guys create for your new site. There is a fine line between too many "mud community" sites and not enough, and I think we are still in the "not enough" area.

Regarding voting: It is my personal belief that the whole vote-driven traffic thing is a little overdone right now. We already have one solid community site that is vote based (you know, the one this post is on), and it does a pretty good job at that. There have been numerous vote-based mud community sites to crop up post-TMS, and all of them either failed completely or continue to sputter along with negligible traffic and utility. I think a burgeoning mud community site would be wise to look for a different USP (Unique Selling Point) to drive traffic.

Just to throw a few ideas out there: an RP oriented mud community site could have things like story repositories, character art hosting/viewing, and RP tools (name generators, for example). People love showing off their creative works. You could look to sites like DeviantArt or ElfWood for examples of formats that let people comment on and critique submissions .

I think if you go for voting you'll have all the painful negatives that TMS (and any vote site) deals with, but you'll never reach the critical mass needed to make it worth dealing with all that vote-based drama.