Retrospective elections must be posted in Chat

January First-of-May

Klisz said:
What he meant, I believe, was that people stopped even posting links to external polls.
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Well of course. Can you think of a decent external polling website? Neither could everyone else; and no option was officially proposed. (Okay, there's the one used for the Sandbox Republic pre-election poll, but I doubt anyone would care enough to find that one.)
Okay, BetterPolls used to be a decent option back then, but it had since got completely broken; and even I can't think of any others!
(EDIT: that was SurveyMonkey. It might be decent, but it has a major problem... you have to pay something huge like $15 per month to be able to get more than 100 responses in a survey! Which kind of defeats the point.)
 
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Nerdlinger

January First-of-May said:
Well of course. Can you think of a decent external polling website? Neither could everyone else; and no option was officially proposed. (Okay, there's the one used for the Sandbox Republic pre-election poll, but I doubt anyone would care enough to find that one.)
Okay, BetterPolls used to be a decent option back then, but it had since got completely broken; and even I can't think of any others!
(EDIT: that was SurveyMonkey. It might be decent, but it has a major problem... you have to pay something huge like $15 per month to be able to get more than 100 responses in a survey! Which kind of defeats the point.)
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Yeah, this, pretty much. When you disable the built-in poll function in a forum of a discussion board, it's not surprising when the number of polls in that forum drops drastically. I worried about being kicked for even trying to go around the ban and ask for ballots submitted via posting or PM.
 

mowque

Banned
We should un-sticky this since Polls aren't allowed in chat anymore and are done in SW these days anyway. The last thing this forum needs are more sticky threads.
 

January First-of-May

mowque said:
We should un-sticky this since Polls aren't allowed in chat anymore and are done in SW these days anyway. The last thing this forum needs are more sticky threads.
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Polls already weren't allowed in Chat when this was started. Some attempts at having external polls were made but didn't get much traction.
And yes, "retrospective elections" are done in SW now. Which was really the best place for them anyway (maybe even better than the Pre-1900 and Post-1900 forums, where, I believe, they were done originally).
 

January First-of-May

Evan said:
No, I think the elections were moved to Chat a couple months before polls were banned. (Not that it matters now.)
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If I remember that correctly, for a while they were all over the place; a specific series I remembered particularly well was in Pre-1900 and Post-1900, but I suppose many others would've been in Chat.
The former series went down fairly normally IIRC; presumably (it would've made sense) at some point in mid-2012 the latter group was perceived as filling up Chat and moved to Books and Media, where they stayed happily for several more months.
Meanwhile, a separate issue led to the banning of polls from Chat. I don't recall the exact details, but I don't think it involved retrospective elections in any way.
Fast-forward to December 2012, when retrospective elections got a new surge of popularity. Now they are perceived as filling up Books and Media, and are moved to Chat (if my assumption that they were originally from there is correct, that would've been a bit ironic). As polls are already forbidden there, external polls have to be used; this was basically the original discussion in this thread.
Ultimately, in January 2013, the newly Chat-based series died out; in March or so, a new one was created (Election Day), and now it was based in SW like it should've been in the first place :) Okay, admittedly, back when it all started, SW effectively meant Sandbox, which made it that much more isolated - and had some other negative effects as well (I made a mental list but forgot it); since the reorganization, this isn't much of a problem, and the election series are a healthy fad again - which I hope they remain long enough for the current ongoing games to get at least to the 2010s :D
 

Nerdlinger

January First-of-May said:
If I remember that correctly, for a while they were all over the place; a specific series I remembered particularly well was in Pre-1900 and Post-1900, but I suppose many others would've been in Chat.
The former series went down fairly normally IIRC; presumably (it would've made sense) at some point in mid-2012 the latter group was perceived as filling up Chat and moved to Books and Media, where they stayed happily for several more months.
Meanwhile, a separate issue led to the banning of polls from Chat. I don't recall the exact details, but I don't think it involved retrospective elections in any way.
Fast-forward to December 2012, when retrospective elections got a new surge of popularity. Now they are perceived as filling up Books and Media, and are moved to Chat (if my assumption that they were originally from there is correct, that would've been a bit ironic). As polls are already forbidden there, external polls have to be used; this was basically the original discussion in this thread.
Ultimately, in January 2013, the newly Chat-based series died out; in March or so, a new one was created (Election Day), and now it was based in SW like it should've been in the first place :) Okay, admittedly, back when it all started, SW effectively meant Sandbox, which made it that much more isolated - and had some other negative effects as well (I made a mental list but forgot it); since the reorganization, this isn't much of a problem, and the election series are a healthy fad again - which I hope they remain long enough for the current ongoing games to get at least to the 2010s :D
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Just noticed this thread had some (relatively) recent responses. The Retrospective US Presidential Election project began with two polls running simultaneously, one in Pre-1900 for the elections from 1789-1896 and one in Post-1900 for the rest. Shortly after the project started, though, the polls were locked by CalBear, who mistook them for spam threads. After I explained, he unlocked them, but because they were deemed too political, they were moved to Chat, where they stayed for quite some time. There they gained considerable popularity and spawned numerous spinoffs for elections in other countries, only a handful of which were serious projects. Unfortunately, this ultimately led to the banning of polls in Chat, although additional reasons were given for the ban. Though I thought the project dead in the water, moderator Glen -- blessings be upon him -- soon salvaged it by permitting the polls in Books and Media, where they technically were not subject-appropriate (as Ian said, they were "grandfathered" in). The few serious spinoffs resumed there as well. The last half of the project was completed there. It was done by the time Ian made the ruling in the OP of this thread. The added level of complication and inconvenience in setting up polls off-site as opposed to using the built-in poll function of this discussion board meant that, even though they were supposed to go to Chat, for all practical purposes, retrospective elections still had to go elsewhere. So they set up shop in Shared Worlds, where I had been hesitant to move my project to after the ban on polls in Chat. I hardly ever visit Shared Worlds, but last I checked they're still going on over there. I assume that if they remain popular, they'll eventually be banned from there as well.
 
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Will Kürlich Kerl

Banned
Nerdlinger said:
Just noticed this thread had some (relatively) recent responses. The Retrospective US Presidential Election project began with two polls running simultaneously, one in Pre-1900 for the elections from 1789-1896 and one in Post-1900 for the rest. Shortly after the project started, though, the polls were locked by CalBear, who mistook them for spam threads. After I explained, he unlocked them, but because they were deemed too political, they were moved to Chat, where they stayed for quite some time. There they gained considerable popularity and spawned numerous spinoffs for elections in other countries, only a handful of which were serious projects. Unfortunately, this ultimately led to the banning of polls in Chat, although additional reasons were given for the ban. Though I thought the project dead in the water, moderator Glen -- blessings be upon him -- soon salvaged it by permitting the polls in Books and Media, where they technically were not subject-appropriate (as Ian said, they were "grandfathered" in). The few serious spinoffs resumed there as well. The last half of the project was completed there. It was done by the time Ian made the ruling in the OP of this thread. The added level of complication and inconvenience in setting up polls off-site as opposed to using the built-in poll function of this discussion board meant that, even though they were supposed to go to Chat, for all practical purposes, retrospective elections still had to go elsewhere. So they set up shop in Shared Worlds, where I had been hesitant to move my project to after the ban on polls in Chat. I hardly ever visit Shared Worlds, but last I checked they're still going on over there. I assume that if they remain popular, they'll eventually be banned from there as well.
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The difference is that in Shared Worlds, we are roleplaying as people in 1880 or whatever Retrospective Election we're doing. Roleplays go to Shared Worlds, so they should belong there.

Besides, many of the Retrospective Elections in Shared Worlds have become a series of elections of alternate history timelines, because of the butterflies involved after one Retrospective Election.

While there might be the odd random Retrospective election out there, it isn't at all like the Retrospective Elections in Chat and/or Books & Media.
 
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