Tabulating the votes... May take some time, hopefully will be able to release the results tomorrow (?); FreeBSD participation not so free, speech-wise, any more!

I am running this contest, the voting of which ended yesterday. I have copied the post and comments, and am now massaging it in a text file into a form that I can then run a script against.

Initially, I was putting the username who voted on one line, and then on the next, each of the (up to) five accounts they voted for, separated by commas, and followed by a blank line.

Then when some people separated by spaces, I realized the script could be written to handle both. As well as, for those who put each account on a separate line; however, I'm using "blank line indicates end of this user's votes" so I have to remove any if they're there; some people wrote multiple paragraphs.

Then I realized I can ignore any text that doesn't start with an "@" -- so then I started leaving in the "extra" text, as my processing script can strip it away.

I've had to add some "@" where they were missing, or where there was a space between it and the username. And, some comments were "thanks for the vote"; or, questions about the contest, which I just delete while processing -- my apologies if I didn't address your questions, although the instructions should have been clear. Feel free to point out what wasn't clear in this post since there are 463 comments on the contest post! I think that's the most comments I've gotten so far in one post. :)

I'm about halfway through processing, and have been doing it for several hours. It's tedious, and tiring, and I need breaks to watch my trades, and read stuff, etc. It's getting done though.

Some were concerned because there was evidence of "bot armies" making votes. This concerned me as well. However, I ended my thinking with: it wasn't so much a "bot" army, as it was a "community" army. Each account is an individual, not necessarily all owned by the same individual -- compared to the troll army by the angry whale I finally muted and won't hear from ever again. So, it's not the same, and thus I can happily continue, and tabulate and set SteemVoter up with the winners.

The script will need several aspects to it:

1. Detect self-votes and eliminate all votes from that account. Also keep a list of these, so it can present it.
2. Verify that the voter, and each voted account, is a valid account and alert me so I can try various changes to see if I can find the account that was intended.
3. If a voter has more than five votes, then replace the earlier ones with the later ones, so there is a maximum of five votes from any voter.
4. Then sort based on number of votes (likely I'll use Perl, and a hash, with the key being the account name, and the value being an integer, starting at 0 and increment for each vote; then sort on the values in descending order and choose the top 50).
5. Verify each voted account qualifies as a minnow, and set aside any account that's "close" like between 100% and 110%, but no more.
6. Then spit out the list of the top 50, and those who were "close", and I'll finish manually. Also, those who self-voted, because it was the first freaking rule! :)

By "finish manually" I mean that there might have been an account which, when voted on, qualified. I might be able to determine that via steemd.com; or, perhaps, using steemworld.com or steemnow.com. Alternately, I might just say "congratulations on escaping minnow status during this contest!" We'll see.

Enjoy!

PS You'll note that I intentionally added some words which would violate the new FreeBSD SJW Code of Conduct. If I had anything to do with that project, I'd leave. Perhaps I'll join, just to send a few hugs to people, and then quit in an uproar. Or, just make up stories about it. :)

Hey, here's another contest: count the number of references and indicate each one. Whoever has the highest count gets 1 SBD. Bonus points for finding more than I intended. :)

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