I'd like ehunt's idea of having just one post per day, just make sure it's good, but I suspect that's sort of hard to keep up/enforce. If you have more things to say, are you going to wait to say them until the next day, if you've already made your post? I think people should prefer to consolidate what they say into a smaller number of more content-full posts, but I don't think people should "restrict" themselves to one post or anything like that. Just try to get in one good post if you haven't done anything else. I'm doing one post today just because I haven't been around all day, but I don't see this being practical as a pattern.
My new guess about the secret vote: secret voter is either newbie or town (or both). Since it's a secret voter and not a doublevoter, any experienced mafia player would know better than to immediately reveal it, and would use it to secretly hammer when the time came. A newbie mafia could still get overeager with it and use it immediately (FoS: igbtennis, munch, and I guess also watno and cuzz, I only remember them in joth's BM, and I could see morgrim doing that even though he's not a newbie); or, it's an experienced townie making sure the town knows he's around so they can plan accordingly. Still keeping my eye on the newbies though.
OK, detailed answer to TheMunch's post:
So maybe I am just incredibly naive but I just dont understand the RVS as a concept. If the goal during the day is for town people to make good decisions and scum to make "bad" ones then having a RVS stage should, in my mind, only be backed by two kinds of people: lazy town and overeager scum. Both of these kinds of players are ones I wouldn't want to see around.
Well, the point of RVS is to get something started. Like, if you don't have RVS, you have... what? Town sitting around and saying "nobody's suspicious, so I'm not voting for anybody" all day. So you throw some votes around. Make people talk, so maybe you'll catch scum in a lie. Make people vote, so that afterwards, you can catch scum based on who voted for who.
It doesn't have to be RVS. Depending on the game, it could be talk about meta like someone else started here, or talk about theory, or talk about the setup. Anything to make people *commit* to positions and *say* things that they'll be held to later. And random votes work fine for that. You'll rarely catch scum with them, but they'll at least set up future days.
I agree with Cayvie here. For the people that are giving meta information, I could care less how players played in previous games. Anyone can change their playstyle at any minute and does not come with any value.
That probably depends on the player. No matter how much I tried, I don't think I could run the town like Galz sometimes does. I tried deliberately playing like Robz (one vote per day!) at one point and couldn't keep it up. And, well, I'm sure people have some patterns to how they play mafia or town that they don't even notice and so can't correct.
there's no such thing as useless content.
I guess we'll see. That's been true so far in all of the games here (That I've been in), we haven't gotten lost in too many posts. There's always a first, but I don't want to discourage people from posting "just in case" it becomes too much to handle.
My vote stays on ibgtennis until he posts something of value. It's the weekend so I don't really blame him for not being around, the game started at an awkward time, but I don't want to *start* the game by giving people free passes and excuses. Also FoSing O for the reasons pointed out by someone else before. He should know better. Lurking/no content is scummier than shraeye's snark.