Practice poll for multiple categories at once

I had the idea for the new IF Awards of handling votes in multiple, similar categories all at once by having people tag their votes with a programming language or genre and announcing the winners in each tag, only for tags that get enough traffic.

There’s been some reasonable skepticism on whether this is a good idea, and I’m not sure either, so I set up a just-for-fun poll where you can nominate your favorite games of all time in specific programming languages. Unlike the real awards, I voted first to give people an idea of what votes might look like.

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Is TADS one category, or do you vote separately for TADS 2 and TADS 3?

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That’s sort of the point. Each voter interprets the instructions as best as they can and then we see if the results are remotely decipherable at the end.

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Well, should we follow the directions as best we can, or try to break the poll, beta tester style? I wasn’t sure.

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I personally was going for the latter, but it seems like that’d be up to each person answering it.

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I’m fine with people messing up on purpose or not. For instance, we have both TADS 2 and TADS as votes on one game, and one voter didn’t list the system at all. This’ll be a good trial run.

Edit: I see what you’re doing, bg always-watching face points to my eyes, then to you

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Here’s a second poll that would be the format used for a single category, with a list of eligible games at the top:

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Let’s see how your new practice poll handles votes from people who don’t know what they’re doing! :wink:

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Judging from the practice poll, the biggest challenge is going to be for any game to get at least five votes. But maybe more people will vote in the real polls.

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In my latest nominations thread update, I plan on doing individual categories. Your practice malicious voting made me realize how much of a mess this would be!

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Just having fun!

The five-game-minimum thing applies to the single-category practice poll, too. None of the games on that poll has five votes right now.

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I think people see “practice” and aren’t really enthused to participate, which makes sense.

For the actual competition, I’m going to put up all the polls at once, but people don’t have to vote in all of them. Any polls that don’t get enough votes overall (like at least 5 votes for the winner) will get axed for next year, to cut down on bloat.

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I guess 5 votes for the winner is just an estimate?

I mean, there is no reason to lock that number yet as we don’t know how many will vote first year etc.

Example: two categories have the same number of games and number of votes but different distribution. But in one category people agree on the winner and in the other category people disagree very much. I don’t think that is a good reason to disqualify a category that people do not agree.

I think it would be better to base “disqualification” (for one year?) on the total number of voters in a category, i.e. how many people are interested in that category. However, we should also expect the awards to become more popular over time.

In any case, we have a whole year to consider how the awards should proceed after the first time. No need to rush such decisions.

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