Phasing out the "chat" and finding a new vote link

[Davairus]

After several months of occupation, I've made these observations:

* Nobody bothers to use the new #AR_CHAT link I put on the front page. There's a newbie who went in recently (the first in months) and he left a comment that nobody present was even at the keyboard to say hello.

* Since E-ant got some malaysians to help him gank the main channel and still pretends its an official channel, most oldies just come back to an unofficial, dead channel, instead of visiting the actual channel. Then drift into their own private channels. They don't use the "official" channel.

* Nobody who drifts into the chat from IRC is interested in muds, so there's no point keeping it open for that reason either.

* There's no conversation in the "official" channel so nobody bothers with it.

So.. pretty much, due to these factors, which combine to cause a lack of interest/accessibility/appeal, I've decided we might as well just give it the heave-ho.



Now the question is what to do with the space created on the forum header. I could put another vote link there I guess. Let me know if you have a good place in mind we can vote at.. the current leading contender is probably mudmagic, since their site provided a nice java telnet client which people use to connect to the muds.

[Sethronu]

we could also place it in the nice white block area !

[Groq]

I've been drinking after a long day of work.. so this might not make any sense.. but if we can set the ar chat to a channel, why not put it to where everyone is at... cuz someone is all ways on in the one channel we all use. But.. we've been doing very well with voting(keep up the good work guys we're kicking ass)so another voting link to somewhere couldn't hurt.

[Davairus]

Here are the potential voting sites I've found on google (higher means it came up sooner in the search):

www.gameogre.com (it was really hard to find the muds)
www.rpgtopsites.com (site is having problems at the moment)
www.mudmagic.com
http://www.rpggateway.com/die-rollers.php (rpgtopsites linked me here, looked very good)
www.toprpgames.com (couldnt find any muds on it, looks a bit dead)
www.omgn.com (sign up form dont work)
www.topwebgames.com (dead)
http://apexwebgaming.com/mud.php (tiny site)
games.plit.dk (ugly)
top50.onrpg.com (this one looked promising)
theogn.com (small)
www.supertop100.com (junk)

And also there's www.mudlists.com, which didnt come anywhere but they've emailed us to let they know exist at some point.

So here are the choices:

1) mudmagic.com (provides a java telnet client for its visitors which is very good)
2) rpggateway.com (nice looking site)
3) mudlists.com (somehow we are already 116th place on it haha)

Or I could just add them all. Let me know what you'd prefer. I mean there's no point adding the vote link if its not getting clicked ..right...

[gr8mage]

add them all. not all of them will be clicked by everyone but there will be some who power vote. Then ar is in all those vote sites with at least some votes on it

[_Clifton_]

I'd think putting all of them would be tedious. It'd take away incentive to vote. In fact, half the time I don't ever vote at mpog top 200.

On a related note, is there anyway that instead of multiple pop up pages for TMC, we could combine all the voting links to a frameset page? (i think popups...). So if we get a fancy smancy vote button, it'll have 5 links that'll be like, vote!...

[theobserver]

rpggateway.com looks good to me. With our high places on TMC and TMS, we have the current mud community covered well enough.

[Davairus]

Good point observer, that link will bring new people into mudding. Thats probably the new one for us then. Remember mpog (and our new link) are sites that help the mud community grow...

I dont see whats wrong with the TMC vote thing right now btw.

[theobserver]

Here is the TMC voting in frames:

http://abandonedrealms.wolfpaw.net/Tork/Vote/frames.htm

Let me know which you perfer. The close link won't work from that page just yet because the page was'nt opened using javascript.

***
Will I go ahead and put that rpggateway.com voting link on the forum?

[Quiet Wanderer]

Very nice.. I like... And the close window did work for me.

[Davairus]

I can't see the blue/brown very well although I did like it.

[theobserver]

So the RPGGateway voting link is up and hooked up to the voting script. Its vote once every 24 hours. They seem to have a strange policy in place regarding vote resets - instead of resetting all the votes after a set period of time, they reduce the number of votes each site has by ten every three months.

***
edit - Put the new framesets up for the TMC voting link.

[Davairus]

How about moving the surge link into the "rankings" column to save space.. it looks pretty unprofessional like that.

[Vhrael]

Aw, you don't like the white space?

[Davairus]

I think it looks like a dog's ass, to be frank.

If I could "fix forum" my way I'd probably delete a lot more than just the white space.. some of those threads arent worth the bump, or the effort it takes to moderate them for that matter. I would be happier if we had some unofficial forum somewhere that people post all their beef in, and just keeping this one to the issues that matter *between* the players & implementors (updates, gameplay, pk stats, newbie help, rp = a newbie topic so that counts as newbie help.. thats 4.. can't really see a point to the other stuff). Anyway, thats about it for me.