While it may be true that MUDs that have proven they can attract and keep many players may be the better places for newbies to start than those which haven't proven it, you're never going to get the data to even semi-accurately measure active users in text MUDs generally. There's also no feasible way to verify that kind of data.

--matt

I agree if participation is not voluntary, but...

If participation in a "popularity contest" list were voluntary,  just as it often is with rankings and reviews, and those MUDs who wish to participate support a standard mechanism for polling the active user count, then it could be done.

An occasional audit of the active user count would be needed to keep MUDs honest, but there's a degree of self-policing that would presumably occur between members of the list (just as there is for compliance with the voting rules).

I suppose the real question is whether enough MUDs would be willing to participate?  I'd hazard to say there ought to be given that many do like to promote the size of their player base.

Gromble wrote:
So if participation isn't universal, how is this list better than the current lists? If it's not actually a list of the top 10 most popular MUDs (because some won't participate) doesn't the reason you're doing this disappear?

The whole point is that there is no way to get the active user count if the MUD admin wants to deceive you. If you think MUD admins won't cheat, I'll point you to a number of large MUDs that have been kicked off TMS for cheating.

Well, that's one real question but before you can ask that, the question is, "Can you drive enough traffic to a site that lists that to make it worthwhile for big MUDs to participate? Just making a web page with a list of MUDs does nothing as a promotional tool unless traffic is being driven there.

I know we wouldn't participate unless there was some reasonable way to verify the claims of the individual MUDs, and I don't see any way to verify those claims.

--matt

I'm starting to wonder whether some type of standard "status" protocol would be a useful thing to define.  A simple TLV-based request/response protocol over UDP would suffice.  This could be used to retrieve data such as the uptime, current user count, peak user count, unique mob count, unique item count, unique location count, message of the day, etc.

Periodic polling of this information would yield a table that could be sorted by various criteria...

Name     Uptime           Users  Peak  Message
------   ---------------  -----  ----  -----------------------------------
Aetolia  12d:10h:34m:15s  156    231   Upgrade to Vampire class released
BatMUD   23d:04h:13m:37s  148    197   10th Anniversary Celebration Week
Mozart   15d:10h:53m:45s  173    210   Double Experience Event on 06/01/06
...

It's easy to do, but largely useless for your purposes, since none of those values get validated in any way. Sounds like a useful idea for sites like this though.