Testing a Votecounter (prev. Any Mods Willing to Volunteer?)

[callforjudgement]

Feel free to put the information in your start post now if you like - the vote counter won't auto-post in your game. Instead, it will be a website where you'll enter a link to your game, and it will give you a BBCode pre-formatted votecount you can copy and paste into the game. It will also alert you to any votes it's not sure it interpreted right. I'll let you know when I've got the site up and running, but in the meanwhile, feel free to add the above info to your game if you like. :)

As someone who's written a similar tool myself, how are you handling the following common issues?:

• Replacements
  
• Players abbreviating/misspelling votes
  
• Unusual formatting for votes or unvotes

There are some other issues that mods care about, such as doublevoters and the like, but those don't come up as often.

[callforjudgement]

Here's my answers to the same questions:

1) The mod maintains a list of players who are meant to be playing, separately from the game (in a vote counter configuration page). It's actually a list of slots; if a player is replaced, then both the old player and new player are listed as part of the slot. So pretty much the same as you're doing.
2) Each vote has a drop-down box on the interface that allows the mod to override who it's voting for. If a player votes for someone who isn't the name of a player, the vote counter warns the moderator and refuses to count the vote until that particular vote is overridden. Abbreviations for player names can be added to the list of players in a slot in order to automatically recognise those abbreviations.
3) The counter will consider any text that's bolded (including via use of the "vote" tag), and contains the word "vote", as a vote or unvote. It will check to see if votes or unvotes happen later in the bolded region in order to determine whether something is a vote or unvote (thus, it isn't fooled by something like "

Unvote: callforjudgement

"). In cases where it thinks there might be a vote but there isn't (e.g.

Mod: I think callforjudgement has 4 votes, not 5

, it will recognise it as a potential vote and ask the mod to override it as a vote for a particular player / no lynch, unvote, or not a vote.

WRT xtopherusD's question:
4) It ignores all quoted text when counting votes.

(Here's a fifth issue that actually came up in practice: what happens if someone votes in spoiler tags? My vote counter counts it, at least.)

[callforjudgement]

Why would someone do that? And do mods really count that?

I think it was a mistake (vote at the end of a long post that had been spoilered for length, and the vote was accidentally inside rather than outside the spoiler). My response was to quote the vote inside the spoiler tag, mention it was inside the spoiler tag, then not count it.

I brought up the issue mostly because a naive computer program, as opposed to a human, reading a page will see the insides of spoiler tags, and not even be aware that the spoiler tag is there without special coding. Thus, it might count a vote that most mods would prefer not to count.

[callforjudgement]

When I wrote my vote counter, my rule for recognising a vote was "anything in bold that contains 'vote' as a substring". (Although that's because my counter is designed to let mods choose controversial situations manually, and counts a vote automatically only if it's totally unambiguous.)