In post 2, callforjudgement wrote:Ever since Scummies nominations were moved out from mafiascum.net to an external site, I haven't looked at them. Seeing them on egosearch was the only thing that reminded me of them. (Even as it is, not being able to get a text version of the makes them hard to check.) In general, I'd expect over 90% of Scummies nominees to have no idea that the nomination had been made.
The nominations being moved to an external site has a bunch of utilities which made the tradeoff overall worth it I'd say (I wouldn't be able to name them all off the top of my head but I'm sure a list of reasons we do it that way now could easily be compiled), but it
was
in fact a tradeoff; some valuable aspects were lost, including (but not limited to):
- Transparency of the process (seeing nominations in-thread is more visible to scummers than the sometimes-buggy method utilized to display them in the Scummies OP)
- Ease of the process for the nominator (it's easier to make a nomination on-site than to go off-site)
- Ease of the process for discussing the nomination
- Exposure of the nomination
- Willingness to provide seconds/thirds/nths of a prior nomination (which can expose judges to alternative perspectives that strengthen a nomination)
- Ease of access to reasons for an anti-nom (you can't anti-nom a nomination you don't know exists in the first place)
Probably more than that, too, but you get the idea.
I'd say the process we have right now is a
reasonable
compromise: we use the form for the official nominations, and can post duplicate versions of the nomination in the thread itself, just with said post being the unofficial version of the official nomination. However, while I would indeed say it's a reasonable compromise, 'reasonable' is definitely not "perfect", nor is it even "as good as we can get". I agree that we could probably tweak the process.
One thing which would be
really
neat but which I acknowledge won't happen because it'd require coding to do and thus is basically out of the question is if the Scummies could have the best of both worlds: record the nominations in much the way they are (be it onsite of offsite), publicly display nominations in much the same way they are...
...But have nominations be in the Scummies thread and through some form of automated parser, recorded without the need for human input into said records.
I'm probably not wording that as well as I could, but I think it conveys the idea which WOULD be awesome if we could actually have it happen:
Nominations would be
recorded
in the same way they currently are, such that judges can access the information in the same way they currently can access the information. (Or even better.) Maybe handled on-site, maybe handled off-site, doesn't matter.
Said nominations would be displayed in the public display much the same way as the current public display function works, where people can see who was nominated, for what award, what game, and by whom. (More or less.)
Yet people could just post their nominations into the scummies thread, for all to see, no need to go off-site and no need for a duplicate nomination, done once and that's it.
But as I said. That sort of functionality--while I imagine is easily
theoretically
possible from a coding standpoint--requires the effort to actually code it which I don't think is something we'd actually have someone do.
A potential
actual
thing we could do is make the nomination form optional rather than mandatory, and to elect a single individual who has access to the nominations (i.e. a member of the SSC*) volunteer to manually parse nominations in the scummies thread that specifically don't already have an accompanying nomination.
What I mean by this is.
If someone submits just the form, that's valid.
If someone submits the form and also posts a nomination in-thread, the member of the SSC doesn't input the in-thread nomination into the form because they know it was already inputted into the form.
If someone doesn't submit the form but does post a nomination in-thread, the member of the SSC that volunteered* for the task inputs the in-thread nomination into the form as to make sure it is counted.
This would keep the form as the official method, but allow for people to more freely and easily post their nominations.
It'd still be an imperfect method filled with flaws (I honestly don't see any perfect option; even my hypothetical proposed parser/automated method would itself be imperfect), but it might alleviate some of this. Worth bringing up as an option at the very least.
*And by 'member of the SSC that volunteered', I mean "In all probability, this is a task that I could and would handle"; what I mean by this is, getting a volunteer isn't a problem with this proposal since you have at least one in the form of me since I believe I could handle it.
