Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 02:58:21 PM

I just thought (@icopress) of another use case: Say you're running Awards, and you want to keep entries confidential until a certain date. You could require all participants to PM you, with a CC to "LoyceVs PM publisher" and delay=<days left>. That way the campaign manager can already see the entries, and once the contest ends, anyone can verify all entries.
You don't even have to (fully) trust me on this: each participant can verify their own entry. Disclaimer: I currently process a maximum of 20 new PMs in 2 hours. If it ever gets that popular, I'll have to check more than just the first page.

While I was going to work I though about this same usecase and I'm glad that I wasn't the only one. I think that this system would be beneficial in three ways (one of them I'm not sure if it's a good perspective):

Most discussion that ensues on the voting of some members would only happen (if it happened) after results were published. While it may not appear, some discussions may actually be a bias to future members who are yet to vote and may feel constrained in voting in a specific user after seeing the feedback that the overall community has whenever that user is mentioned in a certain category. Not even only that, if I'm lacking for a user for a specific category I may be influenced by seeing what is the most recurrent nomination for a specific category in other posts and just assume that "Well, most members seem to like him/her, I'll just vote on him/her as well"...
The PM would be considered a final vote and there wouldn't be room for edits/changes (it would depend on the rules established by whoever was running the event however).
Not sure about this one: I think it's achievable to code a (python?) bot to scrap PM's, look for certain aspects (subject, see if member fills contest/event criteria, if the body is according to the format of entries, ...) and then automatically take care of recording the user input/classification/nomination if certain conditions are met. This could also be done in the thread itself I guess, but having a more contained environment vs an active thread full of discussion could show itself to be easier to navigate trough...

Still, this tool is a great way to ensure that there's an "overseer" - from neither side of the argumentation - that's just recording everything that's going back and forth in a conversation which may prove to be useful in the future - it may even be considered a tool to enforce future deals in the sense that I will only establish a conversation with someone if the seller/buyer is willing to record all conversations by means of this bot. Sure this won't stop scams from happening, but it offers a great tool to help balance the argumentation to be made if such event occurs.