Sorry for jumping into the middle of a conversation, but I just saw your remark and got curious. Is there a specific reason why you handle this differently from the other clubs? 
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BBC does the same if it’s two short manga that are first and second place. (I.e., 神様がまちガえる and 月刊少女野崎くん)
It’s just how it has been done here from when I started, so I kept with the trend. I think the reasoning prior was that the ABBC almost exclusively had short manga, so 2 manga at the top mean you do the top two selections. That’s changed a bit now to where we have been doing some longer manga that still fits the difficulty level, so it’s worth shifting to paying attention to the manga length and adjusting accordingly at this point.
(In retrospect, I should have added a 3rd option to the poll above, as a middle ground option is honestly the best-case scenario after some discussion)
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Yeah, if making polls is an issue, I hear there’s a whole thread full of people here who like to make polls that we could outsource it to. 
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Ah, maybe it doesn’t matter much, but the rule that I know (at least for IBC and ABC, and I thought it’s the same for BBC as well) is that if it’s a short pick (meaning the schedule is 6 weeks or less, no matter whether manga or book) then we add the second place pick straight away. The reason being that we leave a gap of ~6 weeks between poll and book start so that everybody can acquire physical books if they prefer that. And it would be silly to just choose a 6-week-or-less pick and then poll again before we even started reading that pick.
So that means that in the case of
we would simply not pick the second winner, just the winner-winner.
If only we knew somebody who has written such scripts 
Or 10 minutes installing my script
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As a matter of curiosity, does your script handle the rating system used in the ABBC polls? (I don’t know if the other clubs use the same or a similar rating system.)
@MrGeneric Just how is the difficulty rating calculated? I’m not finding that mentioned anywhere (but I could just be blind).
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You mean in the weekly threads? The way it works is you give it a template and you can replace certain parts by variables which will be replaced by actual dynamic contents on generation. Of course you can only have those variables that I implemented so far, but for the static parts of the template you can write whatever you want.
So, TL;DR: If the polls are static, then yes it is supported.
Wait now I’m confused. Are we talking about generating the weekly threads and stuff? That’s what my script does, and I thought MrGeneric was also talking about that.
For calculating the difficulty poll ratings, I have a LibreOffice spreadsheet where I just fill in the raw poll results, and it generates the lines for the poll that does the pick voting.
I can give you that as well [EDIT: I just checked and it is in the same repo as the script], and I trust you are capable of adjusting the formula if you do your calculations differently from IBC and ABC.
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The automation I mean here is the next-book-to-read selection poll (and the whole post containing the poll), wherein we have listed nominated books along with a difficulty rating based on the difficulty polls in the nomination posts.
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Ah ok then sorry for the confusion! That’s what I do with my LibreOffice spreadsheet.
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It’s just an average of the difficulty votes. Numerical value assigned 1 to 5 (easiest to hardest), add it up, then divide by number of votes.
Nah, the weekly threads are a host problem, not a me problem. 
In all seriousness, this:
Is really the biggest thing. Why go through all that hullabaloo for a short pick instead of just doing two at once?
The reason why I have been using manga specifically for ABBC instead of just saying short picks, is because I think you would be hard-pressed to find a book that would be short enough for the ABBC to shove into a short schedule. But theoretically, yes, if a book existed that would also have a short schedule, I see no harm in that being treated the same as a short manga. 
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Ah, fair point. I thought you said something about setting up one versus simultaneously setting up two, and I thought you were referring to home threads. Sorry!
note to self: don’t reply when you just skimmed a post quickly instead of reading properly 
I was just confused because it sounded like you apply the rule to all winning manga no matter the length, and that would be different to what the other clubs do.
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That is what we have been doing up to now because:
But basically, the discussion was sparked because we’ve had a few manga run long schedules now, so it’s probably best to adjust how we’ve been doing things.
Side-note: I’ve gone ahead and closed the poll above as the subsequent discussion has kinda rendered it moot. The middle ground is the way to go here, keeping it consistent between all the clubs: if the top pick runs on a short schedule, we’ll pick 2 at a time (regardless of if it’s book or manga). If the top pick will run on a long schedule, there will be a single winner.
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@ChristopherFritz What should the new title of the thread be?
Absolute Beginners Book Club // Now reading: Ruri Dragon // Next: ???
I’ve seen “Ookami-chan of the Small Forest” a few times in this thread.
Anilist has “Little Forest Wolf”, “The Small Forest Wolf” and “The Wolf of the Small Forest” as synonyms, and MyAnimeList just the latter.
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I’ll just take “The Wolf of the Small Forest” since it is used in two other locations and update all of the English titling in the thread. I picked the “Ookami-chan of the Small Forest” title because I didn’t see any English titles at the time, and just went with a translation that sounded good to me.
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What’s the protocol for picking/voting on the group’s next book?
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about 8 to 10 weeks before the last selected book ends, there is a submission period, where you can submit and vote on the difficulty of different books, after which there is a voting period for which of these make the cut. Then the selected entries start up their threads at least about 6 weeks before their official start, so people have time to order physical books.
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Cool, and I take it that it all takes place in this thread? And that we’ll get a reminder for it once we reach week 8 in our ルリドラゴン discussion?
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Yes, for example, here’s the last vote, you can scroll back and see the nomination posts as well.
No, if you want to be reminded of the vote, set this thread to watching. The votes aren’t usually announced in the book club threads. And definitely not 8 weeks into ruri, that will take 12 weeks and then ookami chan will take some number of weeks on top of that, with an additional rest week inbetween. Most likely the voting will happen while the latter is running.
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Gotcha. I’m sure that in the midst of the running book-clubs someone will mention it in passing along the way anyways, but I’ll keep an eye out nonetheless. Thanks!
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I’ll warn you, I don’t think that was the case in any of the book clubs I was within, though my brain tends to be closer to swiss cheese than actual grey matter. But the voting usually lasts about a week and the nomination too lasts quite a bit of time, so if you only check the threads once every couple of days, you should be fine.
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Also, this round had two winners already because we were utilizing the old method, so the next pick has already been decided.
ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん is what we’ll be reading following ルリドラゴン, so the next vote period will be during that pick. Nominations can occur at any time in this thread, but I also do an extra call for the nominations a week or two before the start of the next voting period.
Edit: oops, I missed your edit, Gorbit.
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