Writing Votes

These are the rules that define what are considered valid votes for the program to tally.

Syntax

Votes are comprised of a series of 4 parts, in order: A prefix, a marker, a task, and the line content.

The prefix and task are optional. The marker and the content are not.

Prefix (optional)

A hyphen - may be used before the brackets to indent a vote line, indicating that that line is a sub-element of the line above it (also called nesting, or 'child' lines). This can be used for organizational purposes or structural purposes (such as the component lines for a plan), and it also affects how votes are partitioned.

Any number of hyphen indents may be used. Any whitespace mixed in with the hyphens will be ignored.

For example:

[x] The first line
-[x] A qualifier to the first line
--[x] A modifier to the qualifier
- - - - [X] Some extra child
[x] Another top-level line

In addition to a normal dash, the en-dash (–) and the em-dash (—) are recognized as valid prefix characters.

Marker (required)

A vote line is a line of text that starts with a valid bracketed character. Any bracketed marker that is otherwise inside a normal line of text is ignored.

Only square brackets [] are allowed, not parentheses, braces, angle brackets, corner brackets, or other variants (eg: () {} <> 「」).

The content between the brackets determines what type of vote is being made.

• The standard character used for normal votes is the character X (X or x).
• If you are making a ranked vote, you may enter a rank between 1 and 9, and should prefix the number with the hashtag (#). Thus: #1, #2, #3, etc. For legacy reasons, unadorned numbers (1, 2, 3, etc) are also recognized as indicating a rank value.
• If you are indicating a score for the vote, you may enter a number between 1 and 100, followed by the percent sign. For example: 50%, 75%, 90%, 99%, etc. If you enter a percentage above 100%, it will be truncated to 100%.
• If you are expressing an approval value for a vote line, you may enter a + or - on its own.

Special characters

In addition to the simple ASCII markers listed above, there are several Unicode characters that are also accepted. These are generally not used, but are available for fun.

For a standard vote, the other characters that are recognized are checkmarks (✓ or ✔), ballot X's (✗ or ✘), or a boxed x or checkmark (☒ or ☑).

Task (optional)

Following the bracketed marker, you may optionally include a 'task' contained in brackets. For example:

[x][Name] Rose

A task identifies a vote line that can be grouped and compared with other votes with the same task value when constructing the final tally output.

A task may be added to any line, however only the first line of a partitioned component will have its task used to identify the entire component.

[x][Name] Rose
[x][Race] Hydrangea
-[x][Element] Earth

In the above example, if the vote was not partitioned, the task would be Name. If the vote was partitioned by block, you'd have Name and Race as the identified tasks, since the Element line would be part of the Race block. If the vote was partitioned by line, all three tasks would be used for grouping.

Content (required)

The content can be literally anything you can represent in text, but there must be something present for it to count as a vote line.

[X]
[X][Some Task]

Lines like that do not count as votes.

Post Formatting

A vote is compiled line-by-line from the post. Any line that does not qualify as a vote line is ignored, even if it occurs between other vote lines.

For example:

Major action:
[x] First vote line
Minor action:
[x] Second vote line

Will create this vote:

[x] First vote line
[x] Second vote line

Any quote within the post will be ignored, even if it contains otherwise valid vote lines. The tally program will include vote lines from within spoiler blocks, unless that option is disabled.

Markup

Vote lines may have markup applied to them, such as bold, italics, underlines, colors, or URL links, and that markup will be preserved in the final vote, as long as the markup is within the content area of each line. Markup that is part of the pre-content area (the prefix, marker, or task parts of a vote line), or that spans multiple lines, will be discarded.

If you strike through the marker of the post (eg: [X] My vote) or the entire line (eg: [X] My vote), that line will be ignored by the tally. However if you only strike through part of the content (eg: [X] Go east west!), the strike-through will be retained.

Note that if the strike-through contains a line break, such that it wraps around to a new line, the entire strike-through section, as well as any remaining text on that line, is discarded, because it's likely to corrupt the vote.

Note: Prior to version 2.2, all struck-through text was entirely discarded, even text inside the content area.

Order of processing

The program scans all posts for plans before it begins processing actual votes. This means that someone voting for a plan before the plan is actually defined in-thread (generally because of editing an earlier post) will still have their vote attached to the correct plan.

This applies for proposed plans, explicit plans, and plan labels.

Special Note

Posting vote tally results in a post will cause the program to ignore everything in that post, whether votes or base plans. You can get around that, however, by placing the vote tally results in a [quote] block, as the [quote] block will be ignored before it tries to look for the vote tally marker (a line starting with #####).

Likewise, you can force the tally program to ignore your post by simply adding the ##### marker to the start of any line in the post.