kinematics / nettally

Program to tally quest votes in various forums.

NetTally

The purpose of this program is to allow automated vote tallying for forum quests.

Forum quests generally have a single Gamemaster/Questmaster (GM/QM), typically the thread OP, who writes part of a story, then provides options of what to do after each update. The other forum users then have the option to choose one or more of the provided options, or write in a custom plan.

In order to resolve which plan to actually follow in the next update post, a method of counting the votes is needed. Thus, this program (or others like it).

Full documentation on the use of this program (including vote-formatting guidelines) is available in the wiki: https://github.com/Kinematics/NetTally/wiki

Quickstart overview

Add a new quest by pasting in the URL of the thread that's being followed into the text box that's shown when you hit the Add button.

Votes in the quest are marked with [x] or [X] in a user's post. Nesting a line under another can be done by prefixing that with a hyphen (-).

Example:

[x] Fire the gun
-[x] At the target on the left

Proxy votes allow you to specify another user or plan name whose vote you wish to support.

Example:

[x] Username1

Partitioning votes breaks individual votes into single lines or blocks. Partitioning by line treats every single line of each vote independently, while partitioning by block treats subvotes as part of each parent vote entry.

BBCode formatting is preserved, including italics, bold, underlines, strike-throughs, colors, and URLs, as long as it's part of the vote content (but not if it covers the entire line, or part of the marker area or whatever). Votes that are inside a forum quote block are ignored.

The program currently works on XenForo (versions 1 and 2) and vBulletin (versions 3, 4, and 5) forums. Other forums have the framework code in place, but the forum software often has limitations that prevent NetTally from being able to properly operate on them. (EG: Lack of post numbers, lack of page numbers, etc.)

This is built on the basis of quests run on SpaceBattles and SufficientVelocity, and is an adaptation of a program originally written by Firnagzen.

nettally's Issues

Voting by task is a bit too strict?

I may have...slightly forgotten how NetTally works before setting up a new quest. I was using the vote-by-task feature, but I got the syntax slightly wrong:

[Foo][X] Bar

See the issue? Tasks are supposed to be formatted as [X][Foo] Bar. The fact that I didn't format them this way is user-side error, of course, but...

It also tosses out all the votes which are formatted as [Foo][X] Bar, rather than actually counting them at all. (For what it's worth, Sufficient Velocity's built-in tally does the same thing.)

I don't know if this is an issue that can actually be fixed, or whether it counts as an 'issue' at all given it's my own fault, but since everyone's formatted their votes this way I now have to count them manually. Annoying.

Threadmark category support

Threadmark groups now have their category outputted in the css, this allows correct detection of if there are a story threadmarks vs other categories instead of blindly picking the first category on the thread.

Retries every page a number of times before being able to load it

The image shows the issue. Before I switched from Version 1.5.x to this version (1.9.9), I did not have this problem. The only file I migrated was user.config

Edit: Happens on all three of the XenForo websites (QQ, SB, SV) and I'm running it on Win7 with .Net 4.6 installed.

suggestion: check that "vote label plan name" does not have a 2nd line starting with [x] plan

by default if a post starts with

[x] plan something
[x] blahblah

then it considers the entire post to be a plan. This is called "vote label plan name" in settings.

This can cause problems when:
a. plans are defined by thread creator (whose votes are excluded by nettally automatically)
b. having a revote (thus the plans are never meant to have any content)
c. when someone edited their post to vote for a plan before it was created

as people who vote for multiple plans are considered the plan creators. like so:

[x] plan john
[x] plan alpha
[x] plan horse

in this instance, nettally thinks that the poster in question has created plan john
and that plan john is defined as containing plan alpha and plan horse.

I believe this might also cause some sort of recursion issues.
if later someone defines plan horse as voting for plan john.
as I noticed that when this happens some votes end up not being counted at all (probably triggered an anti recursiveness check that omitted their vote to prevent an infinite loop).
the only way to see all votes there is to go to settings and disable "vote label plan name"

My suggestion is to add a verification step.
when nettally determines a post is a "vote label plan name", then it should do one extra verification step of checking to make sure that the 2nd line of the "plan" is not [x] plan
if the 2nd line is that, then it is not actually a vote label plan name.

This rule should not break anything even in the case of edge cases
The only edge case I can think of is when someone intentionally starts the 2nd line of their plan with the word plan. like so

[x] plan lol
[x] plan with your friends on how to fight the joker

This scenario does not break the vote. it will tally correctly.
there would be a spare

[x] plan with your friends on how to fight the joker

with 1 single vote (the plan creator).
fixable easily by him adding a -

while even if he doesn't fix it it doesn't break anything.
anyone who votes for plan lol and then another plan will be considered as voting for seperate plans as per the same safety check I suggested. thus preventing miscounts where people are counted as having voted for plans they did not vote for.
meaning nothing broke.

Missing Library is still missing

I couldn't reopen the other issue, so heres a new one. I tried to run the 3.1.4 command line version, and I got the same error I got before:

Error:
An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest (nettally.deps.json) was not found:
package: 'CommandLineParser', version: '2.8.0'
path: 'lib/netstandard2.0/CommandLine.dll'

Chromebook support

I'm currently using a Chromebook as my main computer. I'd like it if this program could be made available on that platform given that Chrome OS is incompatible with .exe's.

If you don't want to support Chrome OS, I'm okay with that and will be satisfied having this issue marked as "won't fix".

If you want to support Chrome OS, I'd be willing to help both with testing and with help coding, but am not quite an expert in this field.

Missing Library

I tried to run the 3.1.3 command line version on Xubuntu, and I got the following error:

Error:
An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest (nettally.deps.json) was not found:
package: 'CommandLineParser', version: '2.8.0'
path: 'lib/netstandard2.0/CommandLine.dll'

Checking the directory, there's no lib folder at all, but there's a bin folder, and it has a folder in it labeled 'CommandLineParser'. Is there a mislabelling somewhere, perhaps?