chrisw wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 2:53 pm
1. This is not a "poll", it's a survey.
2. There's only three boxes, with limited possible responses. Quite a few people have either posited a different response to the three given, and several have answered textually, rather than just a click box tick. Several have answered not-close and so on.
These are all in the summary. I translated all purely textual responses to N or not-N; only Henk's response seemed not to indicate any vote. Your '4' is also there.
3. There are time honoured and established conditions for "voting" eligability on CCC/CTF, for moderation elections or whatever. Sam Hull, TCAdmin, has recently stated what these conditions are (and the reasons for them). Six months registration, a minimum of 50 posts on all boards, and recent posting activity.
In my summary I even accounted for the possibility that the threshold would be 200 postings and 2 years. With your conditions most of the question marks would turn into x. IIRC only 3 would be left (one 1 vote, two 2 votes), but everyone can of course check that for himself.
4. There's little doubt, via statements all over CCC and CTF by a moderator, HGM, that this poll/survey/questionnaire/whatever is going to be taken as a 'majority' decision (or not) to close down CTF more or less immediately. There has been no "official" denial of imminent threatened closure, it's not stated when, but it's perfectly possible that when the "poll" seven days runs out, on Monday, members will wake up to a large blank page.
Well, I surely hope so, that is no secret. And apparently many with me. But, like you say, this was just a survey, to gather information on how we should best proceed.
It will be too late to complain because all complaints can just be deleted, and posters banned for being off-topic, or whatever, as has already happened in fact (Milos).
The 'whatever' is rather important here, as this also covers personal and libelous attacks versus moderators. It is a direct charter violation, and when someone persists in doing it incessantly despite warnings, yeah, then banning him is the only way to enforce the charter. Off-topic postings were only deleted from where it was first very explicitly announced that they would not be allowed, BTW, such as in the voting thread. I don't see such an announcement here... Also note that the CTF close/stay issue is not a moderation decision. So you are comparing apples and oranges. Everyone is free to give his opinions here as ever, provided they stay civilized (as the charter requires). The very title of this thread is a complaint; it is what we created it for.
In real, this poll/survey in basically a survey/vote to close or not close CTF, that's the intention and that's what it is going to get used for. Voting posters can take their pick.
I think everyone did realize that from the beginning. This is why people voted (2) with so much enthusiasm.
Applying the above established eligability criteria, 50 posts and six months registered, to the responses so far, the situation is:
Close CTF - 30 votes
Don't close CTF - 26 votes.
Seems to me some 'creative counting' is going on here.
But by all means, give us a list of 'voters' who you think have no right to affect this decision. Note that criteria on posting count are quite arbitrary in the first place, and at best a very rough tool to establish what we really want to know: whether the person behind the account is real, and has a genuine interest for being here. I would think it really strange indeed when a known author of a Chess engine would be excluded from the vote because he posted here only 49 times.
The number of 'dubious' voters is small enough to consider each case individually, for maximum guarantee that we won't violate anybody's rights.
As Milos has pointed out, this is NOT a democratic election for moderators, it's about a fundamental change/deletion. A mass of ethics and philosophy on democracy/majority/minority etc etc etc apply. Some already posited and discussed.
So, those are the figures. 30 to 26.
Another figure is that moderator elections get around 400-500 total votes, split three ways, eg, total voting mass is around 150 members. As opposed to 56 here. Active posters are what? 250? 500? Another figure are the numbers in the poll with accounts of a few days old only, where do they come from? The whole thing is just bizarre.
There are indeed 2 or 3 of the latter, and whether these should be considered qualified to decide on this subject is a legitimate question. But I suppose you did already exclude those (and a lot more) when you massaged the data down to 30 closers; I counted 39.5. We won't be able to exclude them twice...
One solution to the perceived lack of member involvement could be the following: We flip the switch to make CTF invisible based on the current vote, but allow the vote to go on for another month, or even 6 months. Perhaps there are still a lot of long-term members who have not logged in this week. That CTF is gone should smoke all those prospective 'stay' voters out of the woods, I would think. If 100 more members do show up, and invert the result, we simply flip the switch back.