[Lasher]

Just wanted to touch on this, people absolutely should put their website/mud and (optionally) a little bit about themselves on articles. It's part of the whole reason to do it. It's the same reason people write guest posts on blogs more popular than their own - it gets them exposure. Nowadays more than ever a good article can be very powerful, particularly with the social bookmarking sites, news aggregators such as "Digg" etc.

On the other hand, with the advent of blogging it does make one question why they would submit an article to a site such as this vs just publishing it themselves or on their blog and you can't really do both without one or the other being considered duplicate content. I suppose wider exposure to people looking for MUD information is one reason .... it's called "linkbait" in search marketing, and it works.

[Milawe]

You're right. I do blog a lot, and it's mostly to Threshers (people who play Threshold) because they're directly interested in what I have to say. This helps MY community, but it doesn't really help the mudding community. I do think that articles need to be more substantial than blogs. In a blog, you can just spout your opinion, and you don't need to try to verify anything. They don't really need to be helpful, and they don't always have a purpose.

If I started submitting to this site again, I would do it because I wanted to help with the community and to get back to more scientific/journalistic writing rather than creative writing. Those are good enough to submit here rather than blogging. Also, like I said, TMS does generate a crapload of traffic just from the bigger muds alone. Some people DO just vote and move with life, but there are always some that stop and smell the pixels. It does create exposure for your mud if you're allowed to link your mud to your article.

(I hope I understood your post right. We're having our annual convention this weekend, and I'm totally frazzled! Forgive me if I misunderstood something!)

[the_logos]

To be fair to all the forum posters on TMS, I don't think this is really true. It's generally been a handful of people who behaved like this, and it's usually the same ones over and over rather than a large, diverse group of posters. I also note that aside from the implied insults I referred to in an earlier post, TMS has largely been free of that kind of thing lately. Of course, there's not been much discussion lately which probably has something to do with it.

I agree. I go to the front page myself because I like to see who the last poster was before clicking through.

I think it's always been a bit frowned upon to post announcements about the same game too often in an (admittedly undefined) period of time and it doesn't seem to happen too much does it?


--matt

[Milawe]

I didn't mean to imply that the majority of posters are doing this. I'm guilty of generalizing in order not to name names. Still, you do have to admit that those posts came up fairly often. They were almost like clockwork, and drive by insults seem to be the new rage!

It doesn't happen very much, but I think that it's because people are pretty timid about posting things for their games. I know that on Threshold, we usually complete several projects at once, and we usually either try to make one big post or space out our posts over several days. Some people have multiple games or multiple big projects that occur at the same time. I was just trying to think of a way for people to be able to post their announcements without having to worry they'll spam off discussions.

[the_logos]

Well, I can think of a couple reasons to do it. You could have a blog that gets virtually no traffic and you hope it would get more widely read on TMS. Or perhaps you run a blog that isn't focused specifically on text MUDs (like my blog...I focus on virtual worlds and games in general rather than a specific kind of them) and you want to write something that is only likely to be of interest to text MUDers. I don't tend to write about text MUDs all that much on my blog because most of the readership isn't too familiar with them.

On the other hand, one of the reasons I'd hesitate to take time to write an article for TMS is simply because nobody in the wider games industry is likely to see it. The other people who write reasonably well-read virtual world/games blogs don't read TMS for the most part and because forums don't support things like trackback I can't easily see and join in the side conversations that form around an article when other bloggers link to it and begin talking about it.

Makes me wonder if one way to get the word out more widely about text MUDs would be for more text MUD admins to enter the blogosphere and start talking about them and linking to sites read by people who are not already into text MUDs. Hard to say how much activity would be required to generate significant new traffic to MUD sites though. My guess is quite a lot.

--matt

[the_logos]

Yeah, that's a toughie. If all MUDs regularly posted announcements there'd be little value in doing so (though I'm not sure how much value there is now...it's low-effort though so why not) since your announcement would very quickly be off the recent posts page.

--matt

[Lasher]

For the announcements that are more tied to specific scheduled events in a game such as many muds have on their "birthday", the event calendar may be a better approach. If the event calendar got enough usage a new front-page box labelled "Today's events" would be a nice addition. Maybe I need to build that first and hope they come....

[Lasher]

Vbulletin with vbSEO fully supports trackback / linkback / pingback. Start to create a new thread and you should see a field to enter a trackback - you can get more elaborate with the "Linkback" dropdown at the top of each thread.

Check out this thread, you'll see a "refback" from the Imperian forums:



VB really is amazing software with the SEO module. Only scratching the surface of what it can do.

EDIT: Just found this link that explains in more detail what refbacks/pingbacks/linkbacks etc are and how they work in this forum:




The best link for this is "New Posts" in the nav bar at the top of the forums.

[Brody]

For what it's worth, I've set up an RSS feed from the TMS forums to the MU*Wiki:

[Fizban]

Just touching on something, and let's not try to make this be the entire basis of this thread from here on out because of this post.

I agree, I have in the past posted in threads that had to do with IRE's marketing tactics. I personally hold no ill will against him and flame him for the fun of it. I also have no issue with the concept of commercialized mudding, in fact I believe that muds like IRE are GREAT for the genre as they help make it just a tad more appealing to non-mudders and help the community actually grow instead of just passing around and recycling the same old players. The one issue I have had with IRE's marketing techniques are when players log on and play for a long time, and then only later find out that the MUD is commercial and has pay for perks. I also had an issue with them showing up on every single search result on TMC (not how it currently is, they pay for advertising and totally deserve to therefore be listed at the top of searches as being "Featured MUDS", my issue was when you used to search for "Harry Potter" or DBZ" and voila, Achaea showed up in the bulk of the results, as it was misleading to the extreme.

[obit]

Could someone write a protocall, in java perhaps, using a modest SQL dbs with a class hierarchy that displays through a telnet shell, a list of for example, muds registered on TMS? I'm going somewhere with this, I promise. The Shell would look something like this:


_____________________________________________
(N)ame (G)enre (P)layers (U)p (D)own (S)elect
_____________________________________________
cd>P Games by Players Currently Online
_____________________________________________
generic.mud.example port 1000 35 Active||
generic.mud.example port 2000 28 Active
generic.mud.example port 3000 19 Active
generic.mud.example port 4000 19 Active
generic.mud.example port 5000 17 Active
generic.mud.example port 6000 *Unknown*
_____________________________________________





I just banged that^ together in this post. I know it looks terrible, but it's only a concept. Cursor positioning would be used to keep the top 2 lines of text static. Only a handful of commands would be used. In an actual implementation, upon logging into telnet topmudsites.com port 23(or whatever it happenned to be) there'd be a small introductory screen where you merely press [return] to continue.. For the purpose of making that thing fit in a post w/o word wrapping into garbled mush, I left out a few of the other commands, such as (Q)uit or (H)elp or I could think of a hundred other (T)hings. Simpler would be better though. U to scroll up D, down S or [ret] to connect to the game. The || represents the cursor. The Whatever-you-wanna-call-it* program would ping each mud in it's database maybe once every 5-10 minutes to confirm that it is operational and to check the number of players. All the 10-255 char mud descriptions would be available in the shell, another press [ret] to continue.. Since most of the features would be pulling information from serverside tables that would be easy and quick. The "Players Currently Online" would be the hardest feature to include, as registered mud owners would have to tag the first line of text upon login(It could be wiped before a human player even sees it) in each of their muds with a generic #P35 or whatever and be honest enough to have that tag coded to reflect the actual number of players in the game. Sigh.. aside from TMS actually hosting over a thousand free muds... anyways. The next challenge would be redirecting players from the Shell to the game they have chosen, seamlessly. Images of green-on-black dumb vt100/220 VAX/UNIX terminals keep coming to mind.. and GOPHER for some reason... I need sleep.

What I'm getting at is a one window solution to instantly give a player quick playable access to a huge inventory of games, and quickly move along from one to the next until they find one they like. Once they decide to stick around at a mud, they will likely start going directly to that mud via their own client. WHen they get bored, as players often do, they can always fall back on the WYWCI* Shell and play something else. I've seen this type of thing work before, though on a much smaller scale and a really long time ago. On a massive scale such as this, there'd be a huge playerbase to go around.

As I proof-read this, I see it for the mindless babble that it is, but who knows.. maybe my blind faith in the ability of 1's and 0's isn't too far misplaced.

[Newworlds]

Several inherant problems with this. The most notable is the allowance of connecting to all muds with a BOT. Each mud is slightly different in their connection phase and some muds require registration or other aggreements in logging in. I'm not sure too many Admins would set up specific connect answers for a BOT. On NW there is a security clearance tag that has been setup specifically to allow for an exclusive NW client in the future which would add many specific features, which brings up another point: Some muds can and do have their own clients and this would also add additional confusion to creating the generic BOT.

[Milawe]

I just wrote a huge post to add to this thread when I realized it was an old thread, and my point, I think was irrelevant since some of the ideas have already been discarded.

Still, I'm miffed that my beautiful post won't be seen, so I'm posting SOMETHING, bygum! Darn necro threads...

[Newworlds]

Arrrrgh! I was so looking forward to some heavy reading!

[Milawe]

You would have liked it. I would have offended at least 5 or 6 people.

[newbie]

Intermud?

[Newworlds]

Amen Sista!