Topsites, positive or negative?

This thread is dedicated to the controversy of using a topsite to promote your retro. Here are a sample set of questions, however, feel free to weigh your own opinion on the matter.

• Do they attract a sufficient number of new players to your retro?
• Do they only attract new players to popular retros, whereas less popular (or new) retros cannot benefit from using the service?
• Do they have a functional API (i.e. one that facilitates its implementation)?
• Do they support the language of your retro?
• Do they have a premium membership that blocks free members from listing effectively?
• If you had to look at any of the topsites that are available now, what would you say they're missing that prevents you from listing your retro on one of them?

Topsites do not work in the way people intend them to be used.

1. Player sees another retro at the top of the list, tells their friends and they all join that retro.
2. Non-player visits topsite and finds the retro on the top list and visits that retro.

Conclusion? Unless you're in the #3 , it's not worth your while. Plus, redirecting all of your users to topsite just to vote is silly.

People may not notice, but the topsites doesn't actually benefit hotels with a smaller community. I've realised that the topsites is just another annoying step that members have to make before entering the client. There might be a lot of activity on the topsites but as Shorty said, the top 3 are the first to appear on the site therefore they're the ones that are picked most often.

For the 'Dutch retro scene' there aren't a lot of popular top sites. There's just one which you can find through google. There's a script you can put into your website, which will give a vote to your retro everytime somebody visits it, they don't even know that they have voted for you. So the popular retros will have millions of votes and to go upwards in the list, you have to become popular by yourself first, before the votes will start rising. It's not really helping a retro, being the highest in the list is more of a status symbol.

Like others have stated above, topsites don't benefit smaller retros. Topsites do make the bigger retros even more larger though.

These are some great points -- one of the features a successful topsite will need is a way to facilitate trending hotels (both newer and established ones). Moreover, to reach a larger market it will need to have a way of distinguishing between english and non-english hotels.


Does anyone have any thoughts on any of the APIs provided by existing topsites? For the most part do they do the job or are they hard to implement or poorly documented?

Yup don't use topsites, especially don't force users to vote.
I don't like being forced to vote..

(I just noticed I bump an old thread, u should allow users to delete there posts )