Thanks to improvements in data processing (ahem, robots), I may do a new round of voting this year. In the past, it has been a very manual and laborious process. You can see a list of past award winners here:
https://dmhauntedhouses.com/awards/
I attempted to restart voting in 2023, but a lot of the voting data was messed up due to write-ins spelled differently, duplicate votes, and folks voting for haunts they said they did not attend (clearly bad data). I just did not have the time to go through everything and try to prune the bad data out.
With good data, I used a complex spreadsheet that tried to weight-balance the voting. If someone only went to Treehouse of Terror and said it was the best, what are they comparing it to? Should that one-haunt visitor’s opinion carry as much weight as someone (ahem, ScareDSM folks) that went through ALL of the haunts?
While that system worked “okay” (other than bad data, write ins, duplicates and all that), it was too much work. I do this site for fun, and that part was no longer fun.
Bleep, Bloop
What a difference a few years change. Today there are A.I. robots that can parse data, find duplicates, and enforce rules on what data should be used. I now have a prototype of a much better voting form. It will now use a sliding scale to rank the haunts in different categories. For example:
Intensity should really help know which haunt is considered “scarier”.
Production will let visitors know how it looks (i.e., black-painted plywood versus immersive sets). This basically takes the place of my original categories like “Best Special” effects before I had user voting.
There will also be choices for Tone (fun to scary), Wait Time (walked right in to waited forever), Value (great value to overpriced) and — most importably — would they Return (would skip to must return).
Do you laugh? Or do you scream?
Since the intent of my voting was to let a haunt that was family friendly (“this was so much fun!”) be recognized for that as well letting a terrifying experience (“I wet myself!”) win something, this approach should satisfy that. In the past, fans of a particular haunt basically went right down the list and voted for them in every category, even if some categories implied opposite things.
Side note: You and I are not normal. We* find being chased by clowns with chainsaws to be “fun.” But normal people probably consider that “scary” 😉 even if they laugh about it afterwards and agree they had a fun time running.
* …and by “we” I mean you. Those clowns with chainsaws can go pound sand.
When can we vote?
I have a prototype form right now, but I am still working out a few things with how the data will be processed. My new method should allow for an easier numeric comparison, but … it might not work at all 😉
If all goes well, I would like to launch this form after this weekend, so it will be live the final and busiest week of Halloween 2026. I will then keep it open for a few more weeks to let haunts rally their fans to vote for them, and we’ll see if the data works out this year or if folks try to cheat the system again. Sigh.
To be continued!