I. How to Vote
Voting
Voting can be done by using [vote][/vote] or [v][/v] tags and naming a target between them. Shortened names usually work (ex. “Banana” will place a vote on the user Banana123), but acronyms and misspellings do not.
To easily add tags to your post you can press the voting button in the formatting toolbar:
Unvoting
Unvote by typing [unvote][/unvote] or [uv][/uv]. Do not put anything between the tags. Leave it empty.
You can also press the unvote button in the formatting toolbar:
II. The VC Plugin
The VC Plugin keeps track of votes automatically, and votes as of a particular post can be viewed by clicking the gavel icon at the bottom of a post.
III. The VC Bot
The VC Bot is brand new, and made for FAM 4. It’ll automatically post VCs periodically, but it’s on a timer: you cannot request the bot post a new VC. At the start of the game, the bot will be configured to post a VC every 10 minutes if there’s been at least 150 posts made between the last VC it posted. We may adjust these values over the course of the game.
As mentioned previously, the VC Bot is new and experimental. It or certain features may break over the course of the game. It may get things wrong. We’ll manually make adjustments as necessary, and disable certain features or the bot entirely as a last resort.
Vote Links
The bot will attempt to generate a link for each vote that wasn’t manually entered (even if that post was made in a previous topic (hopefully)). We cannot guarantee that this feature will work all the time as expected given the limited testing its had, and we’ll disable it if it ever becomes too confusing.
Differences Between the Plugin and the Bot
While the bot uses data from the plugin, the VC you see in the plugin modal may not always match what the bot posts for the VC. Specifically, the VC plugin is extremely generous regarding the names it’ll accept as a valid vote. When a vote is ambiguous, the VC plugin just guesses who it’s for in a way that’s seemingly random to players. The bot is more picky.
As of the start of the game, the bot will not count votes that have less than 3 characters (ignoring spaces) unless it matches a name exactly. If the vote doesn’t match a player’s name exactly and there’s more than 1 player it can be, it does not count the vote for anyone and instead will post is as an “Unrecognized” vote in the VC. We recommend that the voter make the correction and disambiguate your vote, or we’ll try to correct it manually later on. The VC plugin is just going to guess who you were voting for in either of these scenarios, and the VC the plugin shows is going to be different than what the bot posts. The bot’s VC should be treated as more accurate.
Known Issues
- There is a 0.4-0.5 second window between the bot checking the vote count, and posting. If you vote in this sub-second window, your vote will not count. If you vote again it will be fixed, and we will check for this occurring at the end of day.
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