I kind of agree with this, there is always a bias no matter how objective one is being. IMO reviews are best left to other sites that wish to push a certain agenda. I really like the Mudbytes non discrimination policy, where everyone is treated equally with banner space and the like.



I don't know if its just me, but it feels like this site has grown a bit of late and that the discussions being offered are of a higher standard. This was part of my reasoning for having a seperate module that displayed the last 3 or so promotions posts. Keeping the recent posts section clear of promotions lets those interested in the main focus of this site see whats being discussed, yet at the same time gives those promoting a little more front page exposure.

There is that saying, "offer it and they will come" and as word gets around that there is promotional opportunities being offered here, people will start to use it and it will become a much used feature of this site. I guess my suggestion is being a little preemptive of the surge to come.

Oh and i do have another suggestion, is there any chance of having navigation buttons at the bottom of the page below the quick reply box. When reading a longer thread it would be nice to not have to scroll to the top of the page to go back the the home page to see if there is anything new.

Perhaps not a voting system, but at least start by improving SEO. A Google for "mud listing" doesn't even have MudBytes on the first page, yet MudQuest is there.

Crystal worked hard to achieve that. I don't know the details, but search engines are smarter than they used to be. I do know that pages are judged by how many other pages are linked to them (ie, a link implies someone thought the page was worthwhile enough to make the effort). I suppose my involvement with and support of MudBytes might be milestoned by the day I changed my webpage link from TMC to here. :)

I agree with all of The Fury's points.

I think the flaw in any mudlist is the lack of audits.

I've been watching the sudden influx of promotional posts due to the addition of a section for them and I keep wondering to whom these ads are really aimed at on a site that has explicitly officially stated repeatedly that its target audience is developers (maybe other mud staff such as builders to a lesser extent too) rather than players..

Should we really be asking the staff here to give even more time/energy to further developing mud promotional content here when it's more or less opposed by the very site's base purposes? They already conceded to us and gave us unbiased listing with free banner rotations, now they've added a place to free form your ad (though who knows to whom).. we already have a module on the front page (under the "other" tab) for new muds listed… I think, for the same reasons that we don't need voting here, we really don't need reviewers/auditors either. :shrug:

Couldn't have put it better myself #3 :).

While this might have been the case when the site was first started and it continues to be the focus of the Admin team, there is no doubt that the site has grown and shifted a little from the sites core business. There are a number of reasons for NON development or staffer types to come here, the listings being one and the promotional threads being another.

The closing of MR has left a fair void and MB has been soaking up some of it. To me it has seemed to be the only site to have any noticeable growth from the close. TMS seems to me to be the most player centric and its only getting 5 to 10 posts a day and sometimes that seems like a week and TMC would seem to have mostly advertising and flames about general subjects. So enhancing the promotional side of this site is not going to give any paradigm shift in its code business, its not even going to lead to a flood of new postings. But what it will do, is bring some more traffic to this site. It will further benefit advertisers who can post knowing their post is not going to be utterly derailed because they "Insert Any Old Reason Here"



These were never part of my suggestion, they have been after thoughts tagged onto my initial suggestion and like you, ones that i would oppose on many different grounds.

Isn't the topic more about having there be a separate filter on the recent posts listing for promotional posts so that such promotions aren't ending up in the default display? I.e, under community there are "Code", "Forum", and "Other" options. Ideally, a fourth, "Promo" or "Advert" or something to that effect would be added that would list promotional posts by themselves.

Furthermore, if the target audience is explicitly developers, why even have a mud listing and banner rotation at all? I think it is a little bit naive to expect that regular players will not come to Mudbytes, or that they shouldn't.

I suppose that non-staffers of muds could come here seeking clients and copies of area files to 'cheat' off of as well, but aside from the increase in traffic that that would generate, is it honestly a good thing to encourage?


Perhaps that's an indication that the majority of the traffic that MR was getting was dev types too.
I won't argue the possible benefits to those advertising, especially as I was one of the first to add a listing here, but it does seem like we're asking the admins here to do more than they want to towards trying to take the site in a direction they clearly don't want to go, which is probably not particularly beneficial to any of us because they don't want to do this so if they do it's only under duress and thus it's unlikely to be maintained with the love that the rest of the site gets.


Agreed, these weren't part of your initial proposition at all, I just didn't want to appear to consent with them by omission. :wink:


Despite how cumbersome that suggestion sounds for the look of the front page, I have two other thoughts against it:

Are we really talking about having enough promotional content, site-wide, to merit a separate tab for it?

I don't think that is what The_Fury was actually suggesting, I think he only meant, if this much, a new 'module' like the recent comments box that would list the last three posts to the promotions section of the forums separately from the recent posts box.

Lobotomy said:

Furthermore, if the target audience is explicitly developers, why even have a mud listing and banner rotation at all? I think it is a little bit naive to expect that regular players will not come to Mudbytes, or that they shouldn't.

Actually, I was under the impression that the listings and banner rotations here were partially for the sake of showing off to each other and partially for the attention of those who wander by thinking there might be something here for them even though they are only players before they realize that they've come to the wrong place. :wink:

Honestly, I see very little for a player [who is not a member of a mud's staff at all] to find here of interest: We have a few clients in the file repository but not much else that would serve them any real purpose. We have some mud listings, but they can find far more complete listings, that they can even comment/review/vote upon, elsewhere. We have discussions that, while often of very high quality to us developer types, would bore most of them to tears and frighten the rest away from our muds…

I suppose that we could start branching out and trying to make our articles about the back-end of intermud and muds and so on be far more entertaining to those who'd have no valid reason to even be interested in such things; we can start trying to upload more mundane files that would be of more interest to those who have no involvement with muds beyond playing such as a copy of winzip or openoffice.org or.. whatever, provided it violates no licenses to do so; and we could expand our forums to include sections for players who don't build/code/admin.. but I honestly think that by the time we've forced the admins here to accept all these drastic changes, we would find that the site is no longer what we've all spent these last couple of years trying to make it and the admins themselves might become disillusioned enough with our forced changes that they'd lose interest as well, which, all by itself, would be more than bad enough in my opinion.

This site was established as a code repository and a place for admins/coders and the occasional builder to come hang out to share mutual interests and to help one another, the forums actually were almost an afterthought, the mud listings were a matter of the membership begging and cajoling the admins to add it. If you feel that I'm being a little naive to think that non-mud staffers really don't belong here then I don't think you have understood what this site is all about to begin with, but I'm willing to bet that any of the four admins here could easily enlighten you on the matter.

Will the occasional regular player wander by? Sure, it's bound to happen, such folks get curious, some of them think downloading a copy of an area file will make them know enough behind the scenes info to become a god themselves, some might even get referred here for a client download or to read a specific thread they saw on inews. But are they the intended target audience here, or should they be? No, I don't think so, and neither do any of the admins as far as I know.

At the risk of speaking out without really consulting with the other admins on it, I'm fairly confident that we don't intend to turn the site into another promotional vehicle for advertising MUDs on. Our primary purpose was, is, and will continue to be providing a code repository where people can come to download the latest and greatest, or a golden oldie, and perhaps engage in some discussion about topics relating to all that.

MUD listings were added to diversify the site some. I seriously doubt there's going to be a whole lot more added to them beyond what they have already. A description of the game, whether it's pay or free, and a banner to add to the rotation if the admins desire one. Ranking lists, voting, reviews, and all that other stuff IMO is recipe for disaster. It leads to far too much hostility.

This site is targeted mainly toward developers, and more advanced players looking to become admins, builders, or developers themselves. The niche we carved for ourselves was working quite well. Things may have changed some with MudRage exiting the scene but that doesn't mean we're going to swoop down and turn into a marketing site. Players will certainly find their way here and we're not simply going to shut them out. That's partly why there are rotating banners, listings, and now a single promotional area which is also to be used for recruitment purposes. There are ways to attract attention to your game without the need to have your players out farming votes every day.

As far as game reviews, if people want to post them, they'd be considered a form of promotion and should likely go in the promotional section. I don't see that we'd need a formal regulated system for handling that, and I certainly doubt any of us on the admin team has the time to perform that task ourselves. Just post something about your experiences with the game and go from there. Obviously the admins will be free to respond as well, and so long as everything remains civil I don't see a problem with people simply taking the ball and running with it.

If the pace of discussions remains as brisk as it is, then we may well consider reserving two post slots or something in a separate box pulling just from the promotional forum. But don't count heavily on there being a lot more to it than that.

Conner, I don't see anyone asking for "drastic changes". :grinning:

I'm reminded of Lydia's "Almost-Complete List of MUSHes", which was on her webpage that also was mostly aimed at developers. It became "the place to go" when looking for a new game. The fact that this site is prone to geekish expositions dos not mean that mere players won't come here. They might even consider a list here to be more informed or more accurate than the others available.

However, once more I have to point out that a list that is not periodically pruned becomes nothing but a historical curiosity, a directory of "names that were once taken for games".

I think the suggestion for a separate box to separate thread topics from promotions is a good one, and is in keeping with the site's purpose by separating out a side effect. I think a list is a good thing if it's maintained, so I guess I'm asking for some volunteers.

MudBytes is not just the admin. The content is ours, and we need to actively make it good. I think the posts lately have been great, and we're seeing more activity follow from that. While the focus of this site may be devs and their needs, promotion is something we all need sooner or later.

Sandi is right. A MUD listing isn't exactly a promotion tool. Over 2 years and my MUD listing has only been viewed 444 times (358 banner clicks). Compare that to a period of a month where I received 298 visits from onrpg.com alone.

We need a good MUD site for promoting MUDs. TMC uses an ugly flat file system, TMS seems to be dying (downtime, no efforts, can't code in new review system), MudRage is dead, FindMUD is just a MUD listing, etc.

And MudBytes is already halfway there. It wouldn't be a drastic effort to continue improvement of the site to include MUD promotions. I'm not saying aim at players instead of admins (that would be almost pointless) but right now it seems like we're push players away.

mudgamers looks to be shaping up to be a quality promotional tool.

That's true, I forgot it had a forum.

and lets not forget that every single admin started as a player, well, maybe not EVERY, but i find it hard to imagine someone running a mud having never been a player. who knows, maybe attracting players to a developer heavy site could increase the amount of people wanting to BECOME admin. maybe if we attract players to this place where there is an abundance of socially mature people, it'll rub off on them…. maybe…. but we don't want to appear to push players away, even if we don't cater to them by becoming a promotions heavy site.

This might very well be an unshared opinion but I think the last thing the mud community needs right now is more developers. We seem to have an abundance of poor ones that do little more than clog what might be decent listings sites with worthless muds. I myself haven't put anything online for just that reason.

so let me get this straight, you don't upload any of your work (which i assume to be at least decent) because of all the shoddy stuff put out by poor coders? you're part of the problem then. we need more good coders out there to upload their quality stuff so there's less of a percentage of shoddy stuff. and by not bringing in new blood, we don't get as many new ideas because the ones that have been doing it for years have probably already done some of their best ideas already. sure there's still some new stuff coming out but if we get more people into it imagine how much more good ideas will come out. you're basically saying "all the good coders are already doing it and the ones that aren't won't be any good if they try" and i find this view to be very flawed. there's probably a whole bunch of people out there that COULD be excellent admin types but they either haven't been mudding long enough to get interested in it, or they just haven't been introduced to the admin side of mudding. either way, there is some talent out there and we could use more of it here. not to say what we have isn't great, but we could have more.

On the subject of promotional sites I will just mention MudGamers again. It's still early stages but there are now more MUDs using the Flash client and I hope to add some 'big name' MUDs to the listing soon.

I'm still undecided on whether it will remain a completely open listing site or whether I will take a more selective view on which games are included in the future, but right now anyone can list their game as long as it is largely playable and original.

I agree with Samson that I see Mudbytes main focus as a developer site rather than as a mud promotional site, but I guess with any community site it's going to focus on what the community members want.

I do think it's important to remember that the 'MUD community' we often talk about is not necessarily that representative of MUDing as a whole. Sites such as this one, TMC and TMS have always seemed very 'dikucentric' to me, and you rarely see any contributions from the major muds such as Simutronics, Iron Realms, etc.

Edit:
On the comments about voting sites, I think a lot of people are missing the point. I had always thought that voting sites were less about providing a reliable means of rating games and more about driving traffic to the voting site itself in order to make it more attractive to advertisers.

Funny, I don't think of them as "major muds", I think of them as corporate raiders sponging off a bunch of hobbyists. True, they are online games, and they owe and much to MUD as DIKU does, but as a part of "the community" they definitely seem to be the part that wants to take, not give.


Well, yes. Hence, the ratings don't work for their purported purpose. I think you're at a crossroads, here.

I doubt it's unshared, I know I share it to an extent, not only do we not need a ton more admin, what we really need are more MUDs, about as much so as I need a bullet in the head in fact. I'm not saying no one should start up a new MUD ever again… I'm saying the vast number of POS MUDs out there discourages new MUDders and dilutes the playerbases of MUDs. On the same line not only do i not want shitty developers not starting their own projects, I don't want them working on projects at all, because once again it leads to a shitty MUD attracting players and scaring them off.