TMS Voting Discontinued Indefinitely

Firstly, thank you to everyone who has taken the time out of their day at any point to vote for AR! Whether you have voted here and there or have been a die-hard daily voter, your contribution has never been ignored or taken for granted. With your help we have been able to stay on the front page quite consistently for a long time. We've even cracked the top 10 several times in recent memory!

Below is the post from TMS admin. I've communicated with him through the years regarding advertising (side banner and icon) and he's always been great. It's really sad to see this shut down. I hope he at least now gets some stress relief.

Hi all,

The downtime earlier today was because the primary hard drive failed. As I have to do some work to recover the site anyway, this is a good time to make a change I have been considering for some time now.

TMS is going inactive as a forum and a voting site. The front page is now a list of the all-time top MUDs based on votes over almost the lifetime of the site (since the new database in 2006). The forums will remain as a reference but are also read only. I will be reaching out to advertisers on the site over the next few days to pro-rate a refund based on time left.

If I am made aware that MUDs on the list have closed I will grey them out but keep them in the list for the history. I will also still update addresses if I can verify the person requesting it is an admin of the MUD, you can email me for those at webmaster/topmudsites.com. There will be no other updates other than a little clean up on the front page.

There are several reasons for this, but the main ones are being tired of the endless cat-and-mouse game with people trying to cheat the vote and generally not being interested in the site. I am keeping the static page and forum rather than selling the site as there is over 20 years of history here that I want to preserve. This will also leave it open for someone else to start a more modern mud voting or ranking site.

I have gotten to know many MUD owners over the years here and, although not so much in recent years, I have been around anonymously on a lot of the games and enjoyed playing them.

Take care and good luck with your MUDS - it has been a pleasure.

"Lasher"

Wow. 78k votes isnt bad at all. especially considering half that time we didnt even properly promote it. Although hes obviously right about the cheating... there is no way that a very similar mud with a 2x playerbase was going to get 5x of our vote, the math just isnt there

It's a sad day indeed as my childhood memories are slowly becoming obsolete.

We dont know that yet. he'll bring it back. just usual mud community drama. maybe he was just salty that dr oz lost and decided to pull his voting site over people trying to rig it. wait and see

Lol Those vote buttons on the forum were my longest lasting contribution to AR :shock:
--Torkalen