Mods who manually count votes in their games

[momo]

Why?

There is at least one automatic option.

[Ircher]

Mods manually count votes because there are no well-known 100% web-based automated votecounters and because that's traditionally the job of a moderator.

It also allows some moderators to do things that automated votecounters do not do like generate a voting history or link votes to posts. (An automated votecount COULD do that easily, but none exist that do as far as I know.)

[zoraster]

I'm very glad Mathblade has done it, but to offer some reasons:

1. It's not windowed.
2. It requires a download of a program. That's kinda passe these days.
3. Perhaps most importantly, it's not that straightforward. This is going to make many people's eyes glaze over even if spending a bit of time understanding it most things are obvious:

In one of your moderator posts put the following information
inside of a [s*poiler=]VoteCount Settings[/spoiler] (without the *)
priorVCNumber=AN INTEGER 0 OR GREATER THAT WAS YOUR LAST VOTE COUNT
url=THE URL WHERE YOUR GAME IS AT
playerList=A COMMA DELIMITED LIST OF PLAYERS THAT STARTED THE GAME GOES HERE. IF A PLAYER HAS MADE AT LEAST ONE POST THEY MUST BE REPLACED
replacementList=OLD1:NEW1,OLD2:NEW2,NEW1:NEW3
moderatorNames=YOUR USERNAME HERE {or if someone tries to vote who isn't part of your game put them here}
dayStartNumbers=COMMA DELIMITED NUMBERS OF YOUR DAYS HERE
cleanDay=true << LEAVE THIS ALONE NO REALLY JUST DO IT.
deadline=2018-01-07 07:00:00 -8.00 << That is exactly what would go between countdown tags if handwriting it.
deadList=PLAYERDEAD-NIGHTDEAD,PLAYERDEAD2-NIGHTDEAD
voteOverrides=

Basically, if people look at an automatic vote counter and think, whether true or not, that the setting up of the automatic voting is going to be more trouble than actually doing the vote counts, it's going to have trouble getting adopted.

[momo]

http://www.robandkriskris.com/votecounter

What about Thesp's.

This one is pretty simple. Just include a list of living players and important links (for which a copy-paste template is available on the votecounter site). Most mods include these things anyways.

[northsidegal]

it's calming
i like making my own votecount designs and having pictures and such
reading through offers an opportunity to scan for anyone trying to get your attention, any rule violations and just an opportunity to read the game in general


i use the auto vote counter mainly as a fallback for when i expect a game to move incredibly quickly

[Xtoxm]

if there was one built into the site id use it
not gonna bother with any 3rd party stuff just make a vc
i read games i mod anyway and vcs arent really very taxing
plus every time ive seen a mod use one of these things, its tends to be riddled with errors that require the mod correcting

[Micc]

Watching wagons move around is the best part of all the administrative work that goes into modding. There's no way I'm automating it.

[northsidegal]

Watching wagons move around is the best part of all the administrative work that goes into modding. There's no way I'm automating it.

[momo]

Yeah I like reading the game. It’s just that moving people’s votes seems like a lot of work. Also, isn’t it more likely that you would mess up when compared to a computer messing up?

[Xtoxm]

i expect the computer is more accurate, and could be improved upon if the site decided to support it, the point is if theres an error the mod then has to put in the effort anyway that you are presumably trying to avoid with the automation

[Alisae]

http://www.robandkriskris.com/votecounter

What about Thesp's.

This one is pretty simple. Just include a list of living players and important links (for which a copy-paste template is available on the votecounter site). Most mods include these things anyways.

this one is so fucking buggy and awful
It consistently fucks up and its not really player friendly

[Alisae]

Yeah I like reading the game. It’s just that moving people’s votes seems like a lot of work. Also, isn’t it more likely that you would mess up when compared to a computer messing up?

its not a lot of work its just moving around people’s names in a notepad program or paste site (I use notepad++)

As someone who advocates for using MathBlade’s VC:
As a mod, you still read your game and you still get to see the movement of wagons as they happen (when I mod, I increase the post per page count to 200)
However, Mathblade’s VC also tells you how much a person posted in a day phase
And this is really handy for trying to read people, since activity overview doesn’t give this information to you without doing some math of your own. And actually counting how many posts a slot has for exclusively day 2 or exclusively day 3, is ACTUAL work.
Counting votes is just having a paste site or notepad program open (I suggest using notepad++, but I used to use hastebin) and moving around names.

I feel like its a misconception that “using an automatic votecounter = not reading your game” is VERY wrong in that as a mod you WANT to see people playing your game and enjoying it. Thats the whole reason why you designed it. So why wouldn’t you be reading your own game?

You don’t even need to read a game in that much detail when ur modding, you can just get the general idea and that’s enough to talk about the game with any spectators or players who died.

In fact, using an automatic vote counter makes you pay more attention to the game itself, since you don’t have to count votes, you can read what people are saying.

[Alisae]

http://www.robandkriskris.com/votecounter

What about Thesp's.

This one is pretty simple. Just include a list of living players and important links (for which a copy-paste template is available on the votecounter site). Most mods include these things anyways.

this one is so fucking buggy and awful
It consistently fucks up and its not really player friendly

to stress how awful this votecounter is
Me and Narna were hydraing for a game that was using this votecounter
This votecounter had us selfvoting us at one point. At L-1.
thats how fucking awful the votecounter is

And even if it wasn’t a buggy piece of shit, as a player, if I’m playing with LLD, I want to vote VOTE: LLD and not worry about appeasing some votecounter or not.

Its not the job of the player to make sure their vote gets counted, its the mods.

Or imagine playing with me and using this votecounter and you type VOTE: Alisea
Well guess what now your vote doesn’t get counted
MathBlade’s tool would detect typos to my knowledge (I remember this being a feature)

Or you don’t even USE vote tags you use bold tags
Thesp’s tool doesn’t count bold tags
MathBlade does count bold tags

[Zachrulez]

Unless Thesp's counter has changed since I used it... it will try to detect and fix typos (admittedly not perfectly.) and it will count bold tags as votes.

Even if you're using an automatted vote counter I don't think it's a great modding practice to completely depend on it. You should always have some kind of manual oversight on it.

[Alisae]

Unless Thesp's counter has changed since I used it... it will try to detect and fix typos

ok but here's the issue:
some people don't do that

[Zachrulez]

I mean it worked well enough for me to use it. I think I've only had to fix a handful of votes in any given game even if someone was typoing like crazy. It definitely wasn't as bad as you're making it out to be.

[Nero Cain]

As a mod that manually counts votes.

It's not hard to do so and you guys need to stop being lazy.

[zoraster]

i require votes to be on their own line anyway. It's my job to count the votes, but I can set the parameters on what counts as a vote.

[Gamma Emerald]

I dislike the "you have to put a vote on it's own line" rule as that sometimes breaks the flow of a thought process, like "I'm going to VOTE: Titus because her VCA makes no sense" (an example, not a critique)

[Nexus]

I am infallible. So I count the votes.

[Skygazer]

in line with what other people have said, it's calming and i'm a sl*t for data-entry

it's also relatively straight-forward to ctrl + f "vote:" and i'd rather do that than deal w issues that would arise from me learning and using software that i'm not familiar with

[chennisden]

I dislike the "you have to put a vote on it's own line" rule as that sometimes breaks the flow of a thought process, like "I'm going to VOTE: Titus because her VCA makes no sense" (an example, not a critique)

"This is because her VCA makes no sense.

VOTE: titus"

done

[RadiantCowbells]

Her VCA really doesn't make sens!

[Alisae]

Wait Titus’ VCA was supposed to make sense?
Wait she DOES VCA???????????

[chennisden]

vca can be beaten by rarely voting and scum can get away with that ez ez

vca can really only "townclear" a few players and even then there's always that 1 scum that u clear