Yeah. If there were a game with, perhaps, 2 Mafia and 5 Vanilla Townies (or whatever), and no other roles, then claiming wouldn't matter at all. Everyone would just claim Town, as you said. Most games have at least basic town roles though; a Cop for Night investigations and/or a Doctor for night-kill protection, for instance.

edit: Basic Micro Set-up. Yeah, so that vanilla game I listed above would probably require one or two more vanilla townies to be balanced, to compensate for no power-roles.

edit2: Heh, just skimmed the breaking strategy part of that set-up. It is, of course, a role-claim. :P 'Follow the Cop', as it is called, is one of the most basic. Of course, in this case if the Doctor also claimed, it would render the breaking strategy ineffective (scum would just immediately NK the Doctor, then the Cop the following Night)

edit 3: But, if the Mafia counter-claimed the Town Cop in the Newbie Set-up (or, even, pre-claimed it, forcing the Town Cop to counterclaim), I wonder what that would do? Probably not enough, as then town would know one was the Cop and one was necessarily Mafia; probably a good trade for Town in this scenario.

Oh well, enough with the edits. :P

thanks krypsyn for clearing up what cryptoclaiming means. I always thought of it as being just a way to breadcrumb using cryptography (or code in the widest sense) which is why I brought it up to ZFR who would be a master at doing that:
I immediatly thought (in remembering his very cool giveaways) how he would post something with a few hidden [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)]whitespaces[/url] in it, which he would later refer to and say hey if you run this post on a whitespace interpreter and the output in this brainfuck interpreter you'll see that I've been the cop all along ... so don't you all believe that other guy that claimed cop. :)

but I understand how it's gamebreaking and since I don't have any sense of how to breadcrumb effectivly (without getting modkilled) anyway, I'll just do what I usually do and tunnel on some townie, while believing them to be scum, until either I or them get lynched. ;)

Do you have to remain alive to "win" a game, or is it enough if your team wins?

No need to stay alive unless specifically mentioned in your win condition.

And finally, do moderators assign roles completely by random (using random.org for example)? Or can we make meta-guesses about assignments (e.g. "Surely the moderator wouldn't give such a complex role to a newbie...")?

Almost always randomly. There were a few "Bid for your role" games where random chance wasn't really involved, but rarely are roles assigned to specific players.

Nah, burned out on forum mafia for quite some time, so I'm not going to join any games. May change in the future, but unlikely for a couple of months at least.

I shall kill you anyway....out of respect.

Since I've not had any progress in a week in getting any actual visualisation of mafia threads done, but have indeed finished (hopefully) the scraper script, I thought I'll just post that and maybe someone else finds a helpful way to present the raw data.

The scraper script is a "spider" for the python modul "scrapy" and nets you a json file (1.4 megs for the last mafia game) with all posts in a format like this:

{"postnr": "7", "author": "Hunter65536", "date": "2017-09-15 00:00:00", "vote": "dedo-senpai", "unvote": false, "posttext_complete": "quote_4] dedoporno: First!/quote] \n Here, take my vote Vote dedo-senpai", "posttext_links": ["http://www.gog.com/forum/general/forum_mafia_51_the_greater_good/post4"], "quotedauthor": ["dedoporno"], "quotedtext": ["quote_4] dedoporno: First!/quote] \n"], "posttext_noquote": " Here, take my vote Vote dedo-senpai", "post_length": 36}

*removed the starting "[" in the quotes to hope the forum software doesn't butch it.

If you're interested in getting this raw data yourself and doing something with it (automatic votecounts, isos, visualisations, etc) here's how to do that:

1. install scrapy
2. start a new project via "scrapy startproject whatevernameticklesyourfancy"
3. put the spider-code in the projectname/spider subdir
4. change the url (and name) in the beginning of the spider script to point at any gog forum thread that you fancy
5. run the spider with "scrapy crawl gg_spider -o greater-good.json" (changing gg_spider to whatever name you gave your spider in 4. and greater-good.json to whatever you want your output to be called.
6. Profit!

oh yeah, here's the spider script gg_spider.py

<poke poke poke>

Still got time on your hands?

Hey, look! 'Our' game just got released: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_mafia_80944

How does everyone feel like having our own Mafia discord channel? I set one up so a few of us can play a game together but we can use it for whatever, even just hang around. Would anyone be interested? GOGfather?

Sounds good to me and I bet it’s an offer the GOGfather can’t refuse ;-)

Just a short notice: Sage has told me on FB, that she will have no internet until tomorrow evening or so. They moved today and internet et al. should be switched on some time tomorrow. So her 'two days' will start with one day delay.