And mine just got eaten too because EVE servers crashed again.
But yeah. Didn't Backstage have a stickied thread on the IGS once upon a time? Or Chatsubo? I remember there being one which is how I personally knew about it when I started. But activity on the IC areas are just as, if not more important than, activity in OOC areas. As people often say, you don't want to just be talking about RP while not actually doing it.
But yeah, same for me, when I join an MMO the first thing I do is look for the RP community and whatever third party resources it might have. RP is the only thing I really care for in MMOs. But I do acknowledge that there's a lot of people who are playing the game just to play the game, and that the public visibility of the RP community is very important and getting some of them to consider trying out RP.
I suppose EVE does have it better in that the RP community does have direct involvement in in-game activities, due to the game being a full-time RP environment. That definitely helps with promotion. My own experience is from MMOs where RP is a separate thing from the game, and so when the RP community isolates itself into its own private RP thing the people who play the game to play the game never experience nor see it. The fact that EVE only has one server is another good thing, as it consolidates people and prevents competition (a huge issue and what makes me wary about third party forums is that in my previous RP community on WoW, my own server, Defias Brotherhood, basically died out due to leaving the official forum to OOCers and isolating itself on a private forum. All new RPers flocked to Argent Dawn because Argent Dawn used the official forums, thus making itself the thing most new RPers would see when they went looking).