I haven't heard this in quite awhile. Fairly rare these days for someone to understand the reference.
Well, I like to pretend I'm educated. I'm glad you got the reference. Given your profile picture, I thought you might.
Also, if you're trying to bait me, it's starting to work. I would appreciate it if you would simply not even mention my namu (name) in connection with your original specious assumption I would ever do such a thing?
Not trying to bait you, and I never once used your namu. I DO take serial #s seriously, as they are the method through which Stardock defends their intellectual property - an issue which I am very familiar with. Not with Stardock particularly, but in the law in general.
Though some advice would be nice.
Seems to me the obvious way to restrict voting to forum users and yet still maintain anonymity is to use the private message feature. Now, private messages only hold 50 at a time, but you were talking about maybe only getting a few hundred votes total. What you would want to do, it seems to me, is have a page with a list of the candidates, as well as a list of the current councilers, then tell people to "vote" for one of the candidats by messaging any of the councilers. Each council member would be responsible for checking their private messages and deleting enough of them that they had room to accept more. It is *possible* that mumblefratz would get 200 private messages in the first hour, but doesn't strike me as likely, and if you got an error that the person in question couldn't accept more messages, as a potential voter you still would have several other council members you could private message your vote to.
This would lead to a fair amount of behind the scenes work for the MVC members, for in addition to tallying the votes they are privately messaged, they would want to keep track of names, and ideally add it to a MVC spreadsheet so that someone couldn't vote twice just by messaging two different council members. From my experience with the various members they have the tech savy to accomplish this, so it is more a matter of wanting to spend so much of their personal time during whatever sort of election period you adopt.
Obviously, a less MVC time management approach would be to have people publicly post votes. This method has many drawbacks, some of which have already been detailed above. It probably isn't worth my time to try and lay them all out, especially if this is the format that is adopted.
As for voting for multiple people, there are many ways to handle it. Give everyone a single vote and take the top two vote getters. Let everyone pick a first and second choice, then weight all first place votes as 5 pts, second place votes as 3 pts, and the top two point getters are voted in. Or, run two rounds of voting, where the winner of the first round is not included in the second round. Or let people rank all the candidates on a scale of 1 to 5, and then take the two candidates that score the lowest (or highest, depending on how you use the number scale). Pick one you like. Or use another. There are some intelligent and creative people on the council, I don't imagine it should be too hard to come up with a way around this problem.
... And now I have an angry woman who doesn't understand why I'm spending time on a computer. Time for me to go again. Take care.
- Wyndstar
