##vote Dec 27

Jan 3rd for me

##vote Jan 3rd

Push to next year please

I was watching this game from the side lines only. I was watching the game though since I was trying out the mafia vote tracker bot. I had to check how it was performing and if it would run into any problem. The biggest problem it had was when day 5 ended early and when the next phase was put earlier by 24 hours. It is hard to make a program that understand those two things from a randomly formatted GM message. I plan to have a solution for this until next time, but it would need the next GM to help out a bit to keep it on track. I set it to normally poll the forum every 10 minutes, in order to keep traffic load down, but as fast as every 2 minutes around deadlines. Maybe / probably it could be made to make those http requests a bit faster...

So what did you think about it? Was anyone using the presentations it made? Should I bother to have in running for the next game?

@ Goldfinger: I can confirm that January does indeed take place next year.

Peter, all I know if your program was super cool, and that Vash was definitely using it.

@ Peterlund: Your program was excellent and I think it's a really useful tool for both players and GMs. I will be happy to work with you to design GM posts that the program can interpret correctly, and since I am lead GM for the next game, you'll have my full co-operation.

Great to hear Jamiet! It will be great to get this thingy fully controllable by the GMs during the proceedings of a game even if I may need to be involved in the startup of the game. My personal motivation for constructing it was to make next game I take part in more enjoyable.

Is this game done?

From guak in the maf QT:
"Apologies to everyone. I traveled home to Venezuela and had no internet access for days."

Well, I wasn't aware guak was South American. Besides that... WTF man. A little notice? How about a warning? FFS

DemonOverlord. I was quite happy to it producing the "Vote tracker" presentation. It is nice to always have an up-to-date, unbiased and hopefully accurate view of the current vote history. I hope that you as a player were able to find the vote tracker also on the previous days stored on the server.

Peter, your program is pulling all of the posts at some point, right? I wonder if we could build this out to be able to mirror the posts in a searchable format. It's an idea I had a few games ago and started planning out before I got really busy with some other stuff. What do you think?

Chaqa. Yes a searchable format it could easily produce and upload as one single file to the webserver for everyone to view. When new messages comes in it could append that file with more text. It is mostly a matter of deciding the details of the format...

I am glad to hear Guak is alive.
I am disappointed by his poor excuse.

@peter: I'm thinking something more extensive. Options to filter by day, poster, etc. Just a thought.

What did you write your tool in, peter? Just curious.

Also some more advanced search tool could be provided with some more work. The server have every message stored as a record in a fast real time DB. This makes it fast to refresh all votes and statistics at any time. Could also be used to do searches in. What kind of searches are you looking for?

X-post. Chaqa Yes! :) It could be done. Lets specify a first thing and I see what I can get done. A filter per poster and day. Maybe extended to a filter for a list of posters and a list of days. Output as a one file or webpage with all the messges perhaps?

Could you develop a bot that just replaces chaqa.

The tool is written in a high performance functional language named Erlang. I was actually planning to put up all source code onto github sometime soon, maybe during my Christmas holiday that last a week.

I've already perfected a guak bot. It's been playing in the game for a few hours now.

@peter: Something like that. The idea I had was to have it all dynamically show up on a web page, but that's a bit more intensive than simply outputting. Yours probably makes more sense.

Can you imagine trying to program a brainbot

the length guak goes to to breadcrumb "commuter" is impressive.

@peterlund -

Your program was great, and I liked it so much that I pinned the current_vote.txt page in my browser for the time I was able to be playing. I greatly appreciate the inclusion of current votecounts, increased update frequency near EOD, and the post/word/char counts. That helped sort out, in a purely quantitative way, who was lurking or not. It also got me up to speed when I still had voting to catch up on. The vote tracker was helpful, but a bit hard to read.

If you figure out how to output the results file in html, you could have the text of every vote in the votecount link to the page on which the vote was given. Or maybe just make the text of their post a mouseover hovertext for that part of the vote tracker.

A searchable database sounds ambitious. Not bad, but ambitious. (At that point, you could offer to program mafia.webdiplomacy.net, write a new frontend to update votecounts live, and start pulling traffic from EM and mafiascum). If you could figure out how to dump the thread database into a word/excel doc, that might do the trick. Ogion did something like this earlier, but I don't know how automated it was. Either way, he might have ideas.

No matter what, I'm looking forward to making use of this tool in the future, as both town and as scum. Thanks for all the work you put into it already. :)

Peterlunds tool has a lot of potential. I could see it becoming the offical vote count.

I was also thinking it would be nice to play mafia on a website that does all that automatically, etc. Mafia dedicated and self managing. That may lose some of the charm we get of playing on the clunky webdip forums though.

I had a thought for that. It could even have special places to enter and adjudicate night orders without any GM being needed. All automated.

I guess EpicMafia is like that, but EpicMafia sucks.

Yeah, a dropdown box with your target for night action. Private chats on the side for Interrogator, mafia chats, etc.

I could see it being very functional. GMs probably like orchestrating everything though :P

AND A SEARCH FUNCTION?!?!?!