For some reason, I cannot use a period in the left side, the logs states: "The variable play has to contain % at the beginning and one % on the end", but my text has no percent characters, only periods. It is a tad annoying because I cannot put my server's IP into the scoreboard. Any help or fix with this would be greatly appreciated.

The left side only contains text and the right side only numbers. So you can only specify the ip on the left side and then you have to put a constant number to the right side.