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Program Usage
The program is designed to tally votes within a post range of a specified thread, and then compile the results to show how much support any given vote or part of a vote has among the voterbase.
The main drop-down control provides a list of forum threads that you can tally. You can add a new thread to the list by hitting the New button and pasting the thread's URL into the text box provided. The program will clean up the URL if it contains page numbers or post anchors. Hit Enter to complete the entry.
Hitting the F2 key, or the Edit Name button will allow you to edit the displayed name for the specific quest thread. The displayed name can be whatever you want, though duplicate entries can cause problems.
Hitting F2 again, or the (renamed) Edit URL button, will change the edit box to one that allows you to edit the URL of the thread directly, if needed, such as if the automatic cleanup didn't work quite right.
And finally, hitting F2, Enter, or the (renamed again) Finish Edit button will end the edit process.
The Del button deletes the current entry in the drop-down list.
Once a thread has been selected, you can set the range of post numbers to include in the tally.
The first box is the starting post number, and must be at least 1.
The second box is the ending post number. If the ending post number is 0, the tally will continue to the end of the thread.
In addition, there's a checkbox for Try Last Threadmark. XenForo forums have an optional feature known as Threadmarks that can be used to mark specific posts in a thread, as designated by the thread author. Generally these are the 'update' posts, and any votes to be tallied will necessarily occur after that point by other users.
If the Try Last Threadmark checkbox is checked, NetTally will try to find the last threadmark of the thread, and use that as the starting point for conducting the tally, running from there to the end of the thread. When doing this, it will skip any threadmarks that contain any of the quest's customized threadmark filter keywords, or, if no custom keywords have been set, anything that includes the word 'omake'.
If no threadmark is found, or the forum does not support threadmarks, the tally will use the numbers provided in the start and ending post text boxes as a fallback.
To run a tally, simply hit the Tally button. It will load the pages from the thread specified and compute the vote results, displaying the final analysis in the main window. After that, you can copy the contents of the main window by hitting the Copy to Clipboard button. Those contents can then be pasted elsewhere.
The Cancel button can be used to stop an in-progress tally, which will cancel any ongoing attempts to load more web pages, and cease any ongoing processing.
All pages loaded from the website are cached for up to 30 minutes. When running a tally, the first and last pages will be reloaded regardless, but if a previous tally attempt has been made, all pages that were successfully loaded (even if the tally itself was not successfully completed, such as if it was cancelled) will be pulled from cache rather than reloaded from the internet.
If you need to ensure that fresh copies of all pages were downloaded, use the Clear Cache button before running the tally. Note that Clear Cache also removes any memory of voting merges you've performed, so they will not be re-applied.
Note: There is a rate limiter on loading pages, to prevent hammering of the forum site. A maximum of 4 simultaneous connections can be made to a forum.
In the event that there are issues with the tally that need to be corrected (such as slight differences in how people wrote their votes), or if you need to just clean things up, you can use the Manage Votes button to open the Manage Votes window, which will allow you to merge or delete votes, adjust tasks, or combine voters. See the page on Managing Votes for usage details.
Partitioning votes is a means of breaking votes up into smaller chunks, each of which is tallied separately. There are several methods of partitioning votes.
Sometimes described as voting "by plan", although that's not a very good description since it confuses named plans with the vote as a whole. For this mode, no partitioning is done. This allows votes to be compared as a whole, rather than piecemeal.
Partitioning by line means that every individual line in each vote is treated as its own vote entry. It will also break up plans into their component lines.
This is the simplest way to break up votes that combine several distinct choices, so that each type of choice can be evaluated separately. Use of tasks makes this much easier.
It's also useful when combined with the Compact display mode for creating lines that are each marked with the number of votes for that particular line, which can then be rearranged into a more aesthetic output.
A specialized version of partitioning by line, this copies any tasks placed on parent lines down to their children.
Partitioning by block means that every top-level vote line is treated as an individual vote, and that includes all secondary/child lines (lines indented with hyphens) attached to it.
Example:
[x] Top-level line
-[x] secondary line
The above would be considered a single vote block.
Most plans are defined with a top-level line naming them, and secondary lines defining the content of the plan. They get treated as a single block when partitioning by block.
Also known as "Partition All by Block", or "Full Partition by Block", this mode will also promote plans up one level (removing the naming line and reducing the indent level of all secondary lines) and partition each plan itself by block, in addition to any portions of the regular vote.
In addition, if the plan name line has a task, that task will be propagated to each of the partitioned blocks within the plan, if those blocks do not already have tasks as well.
Below the Manage Votes button is a combo box for selecting a Display Mode.
A Display Mode provides a set of rules for formatting the final displayed output. At present, there are six display modes:
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Normal: The basic, original output format. The full text of each vote is shown, and the voters are listed underneath. No spoilers are used. -
Spoiler Voters: This adds a[spoiler]block around the voters listed in each section, in order to reduce the length of the output on screen. This is also useful if you want people to focus on the votes first, rather than the voters (since they'll have to manually open the spoiler to see who the voters are). The full text of the vote is shown. -
Spoiler All: In addition to using spoilers around voters, this also adds a[spoiler]block around the entire tally. -
Normal, No Voters: This shows the full text of each vote, as well as the voter count, but does not display the voters at all. This option is to make it as easy as possible to review the votes themselves (usually within NetTally itself), without needing to scroll past the voter lists. -
Compact: This condenses the voting results down to one- or two-line entries. All votes are first grouped by their first line, which will always be displayed, and separated from other votes with different starting lines. From there, each line of the vote, or any similar votes, will be presented in a format which shows how many people voted for a version of the vote that included that line. Such voters are placed in spoilers beneath each line. -
Compact, No Voters: This condenses the voting results in the same manner as theCompactmode, but doesn't include any voter listing. Anything condensed to "Plan X" will include a link to the post where the plan was defined, or that user voted.
The tally output includes a line in invisible text that starts with #####, and includes the program name and version number. The ##### indicates that this is a tally post, and the program will skip the post entirely if it's encountered while running the tally. It's the same indicator used and recognized by other tally programs.
If for some reason you need to include the tally in a post that also includes actual votes or base plans, place the tally inside of a [quote] block, as quotes are skipped when processing each post.
Each vote includes the total number of voters that support it, just before the listing of the voters' posts. This number does not include any plan names in the voter list. A plan vote by itself will list 0 supporters. Normally such entries are not shown, unless you enable the option to do so (see options).
The list of supporters for each vote starts with the poster who first made the proposed vote (or the plan name, if it's a plan), but all voters after that are listed in alphabetical order.
The total number of voters for the entire tally is listed at the bottom of the tally output.