What do you think it would take to make this vote tally thing automated by a bot? Like ideally one could set up the whole thing to tally, send a few direct messages around and fall back to defaults if there is no reply set within a given amount of time. I'm not criticising anyone here. From my perspective after hosting once, the whole tally and generation of the next challenge is a bit of a drag where automaton and routine would help improve participation IMO.
Hmmm, I guess it would be possible to take all top-level comments and check if they have an image. Then you collect
Username
Number of points
Text?
Timestamp created
You could determine the points for most upvotes and last two entries. But you still need to give input for prompt included, OP favorite, and original. But just the collecting of the data and putting it in a workable format (csv, json, tsv, etc.) might remove some of the tedium.
A second script for converting the filled in CSV to individual markdown comments and possibly posting them, would remove some more annoying work. I'm not so sure what the direct messages would help with though.
Having done this for 4 or 5 times (I lost count :). These are my main annoyances:
Collecting all the users in a nice overview
Applying the scores
Writing out the markdown tables and scores
For example, in this round I:
collected all the users in an Excel sheet
added all the different point categories and the Totals as columns.
Filled out the columns per user.
Unpivoted the columns to key/value pairs
Saved the result as CSV
Threw the CSV in ChatGPT and asked it to create markdown tables.
Took the list of markdown tables and copy-pasted them as replies for each user, together with a personal message
It took me more than an hour to do it properly and I guess a lot of it could definitely be automated.
Anyway, it would make for a fun little project I guess. But I lack the time or skills to do this properly.