The Hall Monitor: Voter Suppression

Scratching my head...

The Hall Monitor is published every other week, the same day as the latest installment of the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame drops on Tabletop Battles. A cross between a director’s cut and a backstage pass, it’s a look behind the scenes at the Hall of Fame project.

Another installment of the Hall has come up on Tabletop Battles, and unfortunately the issues we’re experiencing with the site upgrade continue to persist. For those coming to this cold, here’s the quick background. We at Tabletop Battles pulled the trigger on a rebrand, changing from the long-established but now dubious Goonhammer. As part of that, we opted for a full site overhaul, from appearance on the front-end to performance on the back.

In many ways, it’s been a tremendous success. Website operations are like prayers of the Tech-Priests to me, interesting in their effects but well beyond my understanding beyond that. I know that it’s a much more efficient operation, and that’s good enough for me.

On the other hand, a few things got ‘knocked loose’ with the site upgrade, one of them being polling. That means for three cycles in a row, now, we’ve had to host the polling here on the Dispatch. And for the past two, voting has been significantly down, close to a 75% decrease.

This would make sense if we just weren’t getting the traffic, but the metrics show that plenty of folks are reading the Ballot pieces.

They’re just not voting as much.

Isolating the Variable

For the avoidance of doubt, we still get enough activity to make it a legitimate exercise; I’d be a lot more concerned if voting had fallen to the single digits. And looking at historical patterns, the lower vote count isn’t having a particularly distortionary effect on the results. But it’s curious.

The other part of the equation is that we’re not necessarily comparing apples to apples. The changeover in Tabletop Battles coincided with a change in the pace we are conducting the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame initiative. Previously each article covered half a year, mainly because I worried that by doing a full year and giving folks more than two dozen books to vote on, it might cause fatigue to set in.

Eating a slice of cake is great. Eating a whole cake? It gets gross pretty quickly.

So is it the extra step of clicking over to the Dispatch? Too many books at once? I have no way to know, of course, but I’d welcome anyone’s opinion. This project overall has been a runaway success, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room to improve!

UPDATE: Problem solved?

Shortly after this went live and I’d posted the Tabletop Battles article on Reddit, someone raised their hand. u/Kasrkin noted that he has been unable to vote since we moved voting to Substack. While he can see the voting on the Dispatch, he can’t click on anything to register his choices.

This led to some additional research which appears to have resulted in an answer. TLDR: Per Substack’s settings, polls only have two options. Option one is, only subscribers can vote. Option two is, only paying subscribers can vote.

Which, let’s be honest, kinda sucks. I want subscribing to be something people want to do, not something that they are compelled to do. I’ve submitted a request to the developers to add “open polling” to the list of options, but who knows if/when that will ever be looked at.

In the meantime, I can only apologize to anyone who repeatedly ran into a brick wall when simply trying to cast a vote. With no sign of a fix on TTB’s site, I’m going to look into a Plan C for next time.

The Vox Populi Top Twenty

If you needed a visual display of the perceived lack of standout books in 2009, you could certainly do worse than this week’s updated Top Twenty.

That’s because there’s no update.

By this point, a book needs to get a 73% positive vote in the public polls to get their foot in the door, and none of them last time came close. Cadian Blood, the one book that made it into the Hall? Only 48%- with 44% of respondents choosing the No Opinion/Abstain option.

That means our Top Twenty is the same as last time:

Of course, the big news this time is whose name was added for the first time to the Winners’ Leaderboard.