It is important to clarify - what I listed is nothing more than a 'remind me in 12 hours' timer. It has no visibility of whether or not a player has actually voted.

I *think* what you suggested still cross-references the clicks on your vote button with player ip addresses - but only if they opt-in for it. Not that I think yours is a bad idea, I just want to make sure that if what we do is deemed "outlawed", it is done fully understanding what we're doing and not lumped in with any ban on checking player ip addresses against web logs.

This is where we're at currently while I wait until this thing dies down and Synozeer comes up with a definitive ruling.

Since I didn't want to bother tearing out the entire system when the issue doesn't quite seem to be settled, I added in a simple toggle instead; this way, players can turn the voting reminders on and off as they so choose.

I'm pretty sure he's already come up with a definitive ruling on this, and the rules page has already been updated.

Forgive me if I'm dense, but I don't think there is a definitive ruling.

The rule states, "You cannot display different messages based on whether someone voted or not, or reward a player for voting by not showing messages."

The grey area is whether it is outlawed to allow players to configure voting reminders, including configuring said reminder not to remind that player if he or she has already voted. Therefore, it is the players who are choosing not to have a message displayed based on how they configured their voting options. It seems to me that this is allowable under these rules, and keeps to the spirit of the rules in that the rules appear to be aimed at allowing players to remind themselves (or not) however they wish without interference, pressure or incentives by the MUD itself.

Anyway, that's my interpretation, and apparently others appear to interpret that rule likewise. If there's general disagreement, then I don't think it is completely out of line to ask for clarification.

I think it's best to keep the automated voting reminders that differentiate whether someone voted or not separate from the mud. If it's allowed, I can see muds then setting the default for it to be on. If not that, then muds might spam reminders to turn the default voting reminder on until it's turned on.

I'd rather not open up the door to another whole subsection of rules, so let's just say mud reminders that work based on whether someone voted or not are not allowed, regardless of whether the player opted to show them on a mud or not.

However, if you want to have mud reminders that don't work differently when someone votes or not (for instance, showing a message every hour even if you voted), that's fine.

Adam

This all shows the futility of competing against pay-to-play muds who have a financial interest in being within the Top 10. The mud I'm involved in (AVATAR), encouraged players to vote for a few months to see how hard it was to be there and it was tiresome to all involved.

Although the system is quite cool and being listed as a top site draws additional players to our mud, I'll leave it to you folks. Achaea is quite right in stating that his playerbase is free to do what they want until it is changed. Like anything, unless there is code to prevent it...rules will only be followed by those who care.

- Crom

No need to be speculative about this. I'm the biggest advertiser on the site right now, and I have statistics on how many people sign up for Achaea and cite Topmudsites as where they heard about us.

Keeping in mind that we regularly purge our database of inactive characters (which may mean inactive for as little as two days if that character has little playing time), we have 143 characters in our database that were created in the last 7 days that heard about us from TMS. 346 in the last month. 548 in the last 90 days. 1142 in total. 347 of those from the total are customers.

Stats for Imperian and Aetolia are about the same, proportionally, given the difference in size between Achaea and the two of them.

In short, there is nothing at all wrong with viewers coming from TMS. It's a fantastic source of focused traffic.

--matt

Well as I pointed out in another thread, you wouldn't spam the newbies - you'd wait until people had been playing for a while and then start spamming them. Some of the larger muds are able to pressure players into buying expensive donation equipment - persuading them to vote twice per day would be simple by comparison.

Which at first glance is a perfectly reasonable idea. The problem is that it opens so many new doors to abuse.

It skews the results because a much larger percentage of the playerbase are likely to vote, simply to get rid of the spam. Thus a mud with a smaller playerbase might end up with a far higher ranking than one with a large playerbase, simply because the latter mud doesn't pressure the players into voting.

Perhaps it is time to start considering ranking pay-for-play MUDs on a separate list from the free ones...

Okay, for the record -

Even though I still think it's a shame that an innocuous (and, in my opinion, ethically legitimate) usage of vote tracking such as ours was caught in the crossfire here, I've updated our code to comply with Synozeer's new rule clarification. Our voting reminders are no longer dependent on TMS vote tracking - and I will probably leave in the recently-added tweaks allowing folks to toggle the reminders on and off, for good measure.


T.