Had a look at that PBP i put together again this morning, just to see what I could determine from it. My thought process is basically, if I can somehow neutrally seperate the general talking points out of the thread, and then assign various participants as PRO or ANTI said talking point, I could attempt to keep a tally on various players and try to get a better feel for their overall stance.
The immediate first issue I saw was, though it might be easy to assign someone as PRO or ANTI based on what they have said, it is a magnitude more difficult to then say that PRO is good for town, or PRO is good for mafia, as that assignment hinges on personal opinion. Let's start with some data:
Topic 1: Voting out lurkers.
Pro stance expressed: al4xz, Megatheory, Restfermata
Anti stance expressed: Wall-E, Mana-Ku, Cream147, Shanba
Topic 2: Voting-to-Pressure
Pro stance expressed: Slicey, fouxdufafa
Anti stance expressed: Slepz, Shanba, Empking
Topic 3: Releasing a play-by-play without conclusions
Pro stance expressed: Moratorium, Wall-E, DynamoXI, al4xz, Slicey, Cream147
Anti stance expressed: farside22, Sir Tornado, armlx, Riceballtail
My opinion for these three topics, for example, would be that for all three cases, PRO is pro-town. So if I just look at this arbitrarily without going into specific details, a name like Shanba emerges as having two pro-scum strikes on these topics. It's not enough for a vote, I'll have to go look at the conversations themselves and see what was said, but I'll probably keep something like this in my notations as a tally for these and future topics.
Something else: 20% of our players have not contributed anything beyond a /confirm and some jokevotes or asking permission to lurk. Azuma, martin312, Demon Pineapple, Jebus, and Xtoxm.
Another tally of interest to me is the number of times someone goes out of his way to defend someone else (Ctrl-F for "defend"). So far this tally is fairly spread out, and so there are not enough cases of this to suspect anyone in particular, but I think over time that's something good to keep tabs on.
I do have a concern about the reaction that putting out a PBP generated. Let's assume that I was scum (which I am not). The benefit to me to spend an hour or two reading through the entire thread, trying to figure out what everyone is saying, counting it all up, correcting my numerous mistakes, all this just to "make it appear" that I am contributing (I haven't exactly been mute during this game).. really seems disproportionate to the potential benefit of having a quick, neutral reference to the opening of the game. I know some of you disagree (as I've listed you above), but that's my case on myself. My REAL concern is that the reaction this generated will cause a "chilling effect" on anyone else's desire to share information with town ("Well, I'd post about this thing I learned, but that last guy who posted the PBP got slaughtered... forget it, I'll just lurk more").
This said, SirT, you've parried my foil. I don't believe my case on your posting style and metagame to be strong enough to garner support, nor do I really have enough faith in it myself. I don't think there is really anyone out there at the moment with enough evidence against them worth a vote at this time.
Unvote
PS: If anyone else has any information that they have been able to extract from the PBP, please contribute.
Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.