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show levers / name levers / blink connected

35 (6.4%)

excavate - mine without stone production

32 (5.9%)

stop dwarven entrance dance when ordered inside

73 (13.4%)

forbidden area designation

20 (3.7%)

more raw files

50 (9.2%)

job priorities

55 (10.1%)

combine stacks / better stack handling

65 (11.9%)

more underground diversity

93 (17%)

improved sieges

48 (8.8%)

framerate improvements

75 (13.7%)

Total Members Voted: 545

[Puzzlemaker]

Hooray!!

[Draco18s]

Neato frichito.

[zagibu]

Anyone has any experience with this board software? How do I modify/close a poll?
Not that there is need for it, yet, but still...

[Toady One]

You should be able to do it now.  This forum has "general" and "board" based permissions, and it was set in one and not the other.

However -- while it's a million times more convenient to use the poll feature than doing it manually, it only takes one person with multiple accounts to utterly corrupt the process, so it's more difficult for me to justify using the results to steer development.  I'm unaware of a way to verify the results are genuine, since I can't view the IPs/members that have voted -- and I don't particularly want this information, since in this format there's an assumption of anonymity, yet at the same time, I'd need something...  I don't know of an easy way to check that extra accounts haven't been created just to vote in polls.  As somebody mentioned over in the sig poll thread, I can check for overlapping IPs if I already have a member in mind, but that's not very useful for this application as far as I can tell, and an IP check probably isn't sufficient anyway.

[Puzzlemaker]

You should be able to do it now.  This forum has "general" and "board" based permissions, and it was set in one and not the other.

However -- while it's a million times more convenient to use the poll feature than doing it manually, it only takes one person with multiple accounts to utterly corrupt the process, so it's more difficult for me to justify using the results to steer development.  I'm unaware of a way to verify the results are genuine, since I can't view the IPs/members that have voted -- and I don't particularly want this information, since in this format there's an assumption of anonymity, yet at the same time, I'd need something...  I don't know of an easy way to check that extra accounts haven't been created just to vote in polls.  As somebody mentioned over in the sig poll thread, I can check for overlapping IPs if I already have a member in mind, but that's not very useful for this application as far as I can tell, and an IP check probably isn't sufficient anyway.

Methinks you are being a wee bit paranoid...

[zagibu]

You should be able to do it now.  This forum has "general" and "board" based permissions, and it was set in one and not the other.

However -- while it's a million times more convenient to use the poll feature than doing it manually, it only takes one person with multiple accounts to utterly corrupt the process, so it's more difficult for me to justify using the results to steer development.  I'm unaware of a way to verify the results are genuine, since I can't view the IPs/members that have voted -- and I don't particularly want this information, since in this format there's an assumption of anonymity, yet at the same time, I'd need something...  I don't know of an easy way to check that extra accounts haven't been created just to vote in polls.  As somebody mentioned over in the sig poll thread, I can check for overlapping IPs if I already have a member in mind, but that's not very useful for this application as far as I can tell, and an IP check probably isn't sufficient anyway.

Ha, as if the order should matter for you. We want ALL Top 10 suggestions implemented NOW .

But seriously, I hope the sheer number of votes will make any tampering insignificant. If not, we can still go back to the manual chore.

[Toady One]

Methinks you are being a wee bit paranoid...

I don't think I'm being irrational.  ~10% of the recent signups are 1 vote 0 posts.  I believe all of those accounts are legitimate, but it'd take just one Moin a few minutes to completely invalidate a 35 vote poll.  Yeah, if the numbers are higher, it would take a Moin longer, and he probably wouldn't bother, but I don't think I merited an offhand dismissal.  The game is important to me, feedback is important to me, I act on it, and it's best if it's as accurate as possible.  Anyway, I'm not trying to put an undue burden on anybody, but I thought I'd air out my concerns early in this new process.

[Puzzlemaker]

Methinks you are being a wee bit paranoid...

I don't think I'm being irrational.  ~10% of the recent signups are 1 vote 0 posts.  I believe all of those accounts are legitimate, but it'd take just one Moin a few minutes to completely invalidate a 35 vote poll.  Yeah, if the numbers are higher, it would take a Moin longer, and he probably wouldn't bother, but I don't think I merited an offhand dismissal.  The game is important to me, feedback is important to me, I act on it, and it's best if it's as accurate as possible.  Anyway, I'm not trying to put an undue burden on anybody, but I thought I'd air out my concerns early in this new process.

Unless I am mistaken, I think it does some tracking with the poll; otherwise, how could there be a "Remove Vote" option?  A sanity check shouldn't be too hard to set up.

[zagibu]

The game is important to me, feedback is important to me, I act on it, and it's best if it's as accurate as possible.  Anyway, I'm not trying to put an undue burden on anybody, but I thought I'd air out my concerns early in this new process.

And we really appreciate it. But as I said, the possibility to change back to a manual selection is always there. I'm quite easy when it comes to changing things back and forth several times. I've made the experience that it's usually worth it to try new things. But I've also learnt that it's wise to always keep a backup strategy at hand.

[Lunval Vici]

I'm not saying that every 0 post voter is legit but just so you know, when I registered on the forum not so long ago I did it because I wanted to vote on one of these things.
Edit: To sum up: I was once a 0 post voter.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I voted for the lever one.

But I like these other three:
forbidden area designation
job priorities
stop dwarven entrance dance when ordered inside

Although you could move the entrance dance back inside if you had forbidden area designation, and it adds functionality elsewhere, so I'd rather have that before the specific entrance dance fix.

As for job priorities, I'd be happy to just have a list of all tasks with "move up", "move down", "move to top", and "move to bottom" commands.

The others in the poll would be cool I guess, except excavation without stone. That makes no sense and is stupid for a whole lot of reasons.

[Toady One]

I'm not saying that every 0 post voter is legit but just so you know, when I registered on the forum not so long ago I did it because I wanted to vote on one of these things.

Absolutely.  I wasn't calling anybody out, just pointing out that it's an easy and reasonably frequent thing to register and vote, before going into my concern.  I don't think there's a problem at this point.  I was just imagining in the future receiving a completed poll, seeing the largest bar, and not being clear about what was behind it.  With the prior top-vote getter mass constructions and accompanying name list and posts, it was good to see that, yeah, I know these people, etc., and that I was operating under essentially zero doubt, though I suppose you lose that even in the manual system if it becomes more popular.

SMF has a remove vote option, but no tools that utilize the stored member info (which isn't surprising, since forum polls aren't supposed to be serious business, I gather, he he he).  I suppose they could be modded in but I'm not sure what that would mean.  Perhaps running the built in IP duplicate check or lumped registration dates, however that would work...  it's sort of weird to consider going through that much trouble, but other built-in anti-Moin systems are also fairly elaborate (such as the anti-bot stuff).  Anyway, it'll all be fine somehow.  Yeah.  I should sleep, it's almost 9AM.

[Lunval Vici]

Since you are here Toady I'd like to suggest this:

Since I have mixed feelings about these polls since you clearly have a greater oversight regarding the development of DF - wouldn't it be better if you would present us with a list of features so that we won't be asking you to implement stuff you have on next years schedule - just things you have already decided to tackle but haven't decided in what order to do them.

[Devath]

He does:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_v1.html

If you were referring to arc order... That might be helpful, but I think its pretty arbitrary. As for polls like this one, notice how small some of the suggestions are. While some of them are broad-range statements that Toady has already said a few things about, others are slightly more out-of-sight for the developer. While the constructions one could have been obvious, it takes specific goals to come up with the need for such a feature. Similar things may be said of levers and the like.

To cover security issues, Toady is justified in his suspicions. Smaller forums have less problems with said cheating, generally, but it depends on who exactly is paying attention to the thread. Note that before the forum switch, Toady didn't seem to pay any excessive attention to this thread at all. (I have sort of noticed a pattern... Unless there is something wrong with the way the thread handles something, he quietly takes it into consideration, no one the wiser. O.O) The more attention is given by the dev to a thread, the more it stands out, of course.

Just from what I have seen so far, the concerns are somewhat irrelevant, however, the reason larger boards have better registry protections and other protections against multi-accounting are for reasons quite like this one. Multi-accounting gives a single person slightly too much leverage. And in a case where there is a thread like this one, which is given somewhat heavy weight based on its density of information, accuracy of said information is fairly important. So measures taken to preserve this accuracy seem perfectly in line with me.

People underestimate the value of a quick, accurate, and fairly complete document presenting information to anyone developing something, no matter what said something or information is. This is the reason for Wikipedia's popularity. In any case, to wrap this up, the way this should be handled should be based upon the results we see, although adding something that indexed the users voting on a poll shouldn't be too hard. The system already handles whether a user has voted in a poll or not individually, so it is a matter of getting the system to output that information to the relevant user, namely Toady. More would be complicated and likely not worth it unless polls like this one are to become an ongoing feature.

[Puzzlemaker]

Yeah, I definitely see Toady One's point.

A quick check shows that it stores the poll options by member ID.

Also, it seems that accounts sharing IP's are allowed.  But, accounts can't share e-mails.  This is fairly easy to get around, though.

There was a small script for finding accounts that use the same IP's as others, but it was for an older version and didn't look too reliable.  The best method might actually be a third piece of software hosted on the server.

A quick google search turns up a few options.

http://www.votenet.com/
http://votingplace.net/
http://www.worldvotingbooth.com/
http://www.linux.com/feature/12439

I don't have any experience with any of those, so I don't know how helpful they would be.  Maybe modifying the forum would be the way to go; storing IP's in the vote data.