This is a post for some basic guidelines on 'vote etiquette', mostly so I can just link it the next twenty times someone wants to know if it's okay for them to submit a write-in or whatever.
The summarized version is that you don't need to ask if it's okay. Generally, the worst outcome is I ignore the vote or maybe, if it gets popular and I have some reason to shoot it down, I say 'sorry, that vote isn't winning: please vote for other things'. I'm not going to get mad over someone voting 'inappropriately'. (Unless it's in the sense of violating site rules, I guess, but that's a different issue)
But specifics are typically more useful than vague summaries, so have a list of such specifics:
-Write-ins are always okay to submit. Even if I don't list 'write-in' as an option, even if I explicitly discourage write-ins in the post itself, you may submit a write-in. I regularly overlook possible ideas that do in fact make sense, and will gladly accept such write-ins even if I just said 'please don't do write-ins': you should take such a request as 'I'm being more stringent on accepting write-ins', not as 'I'm completely refusing to accept write-ins'.
-If you have a specific idea that isn't 'transformative' (That is, it's mostly 'do a canon vote, but do something extra or do a specific part differently from what the canon vote says'), you can feel free to submit it as a sub-vote attached to a 'canon' vote option. If the idea is 'free' or 'cheap', I often fold such ideas into the winning vote even if few people actually explicitly voted for such a sub-vote. I sometimes do this even if the sub-vote's main vote wasn't the winner at all!
-Sometimes, I create a post where it really ought to be possible for multiple votes to win together, but I still present it as 'vote for just one thing'. It's perfectly fine to point out that the 'canon' votes don't seem mutually exclusive, and in fact is fine to vote for multiple 'canon' vote options at once: again, generally the worst that happens is I ignore part of your vote, and more often I'll go 'yeah, I didn't think that through adequately, I'm adjusting this vote opportunity accordingly'.
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To the extent I do discourage things, the things you might wish to avoid are the following:
-Write-ins that try to put words into Sabrina's mouth might not work out the way you want if they do win. I'm writing Sabrina as a character, not a vote-bot, and so if I feel the words you put down aren't in-character for her, I'll do my best to translate your intentions into a manner of speech fitting to Sabrina. Inevitably, this creates the risk I might misunderstand what was meant to be the point.
-The larger, more complex, and more specific your write-in gets, the more likely it is to be ignored, whether in the literal sense of 'I just don't count it as part of the vote at all' or in the sense of 'I let it win, but the update only partially follows the write-in'. Complex and specific write-ins are often rooted in fairly specific assumptions about what is happening and what will be happening, and I'm always more inclined to simply discard parts of such a plan rather than having Sabrina robotically walk right into screwing herself over because that's what the winning vote would produce if held to in context. Again: Sabrina is a character, not a vote-bot.
-Write-ins that are substantially at odds with how Sabrina's character has developed are at the highest risk of being explicitly shot down. If you think you have a clever idea for how to optimize the situation in front of her, consider asking yourself: can you imagine Sabrina actually wanting to implement your idea?
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Lastly, have some QM Philosophy (Well, life philosophy in practice) from me to try to contextualize the above and also to possibly preemptively address things I haven't explicitly thought of.
On paper, the goal of mechanisms like public voting systems is to give 'the people' a 'voice': input on how things are run, what matters, what can be put off, how things ought to be done, and so on. A 'bottom-up' input system, as opposed to a 'top-down' input system where a small number of people dictate things to everyone else.
In practice, most executions of the concept end up being some mixture of that 'top-down' input and insanity via bureaucratic literalness: the vote options are defined by 'the top', voting is restricted to what was defined as a valid voting option by 'the top', and there's no capacity to incorporate context or 'if-then' type statements. ("If we do X, I also want us to do Y. If we do not do X, I absolutely do not want to do Y") The People have 'choice', but only the choices The Top thought to offer them, and the choices are functionally something closer to abstract ideological comparisons ("I want to vote 'green'.") than they are to any kind of practical choice, because context isn't really a part of the vote. ("Okay, so my 'green' vote will result in... something. I'm not entirely clear what. I'd like more nuclear power plants, personally, but I'm not sure my 'green' vote will actually push the scale more toward nuclear power plants. It might lead to existing ones being shut down...")
And I realize the prior sounds like I'm talking about real-life politics, but while it absolutely applies to that context, I'm actually talking about common QM habits right now!
Where for me Quests have always seemed like an opportunity to escape a lot of that insanity: they're comparatively small-scale, votes are offered at specific points on specific topics in a known context, and there's a singular individual (Or occasionally small team) running the Quest who is acting as a 'filter' between the voting input and the Quest output to intelligently make sure a vote isn't accepted and robotically executed where literally no one wants the result, because they should have the context and be able to tell if severe mismatches are occurring between 'what they intend to be known to be going on' and 'what their voters actually think is going on'. Among other awful consequences the Quest format is able to avoid. (But individual Quests have at times quite infamously rammed right into)
So my approach to QMing is driven pretty heavily by this concept of 'listening to the will of the voters, but in a way that listens to what they want, not what I allowed them to say'.
With a heavy dose of telling a story thrown in there, but my approach to storytelling is a whole other concept I never seem to get across to people, and is more lightly relevant to this 'vote etiquette' post.
