David - ita's the only person who currently has access to that data.

We could use this current vote as a yardstick though and see how many people vote.

That was my thought. Plus we could look at the last few Mr Poll thread name polls to help us gauge the number.

A quorum of 10 out of several hundreds is NOT meaningful.

I think registered users can be divided up into several categories.

1) People who registered and are regular posters. (I.e. all the stompies and the names we see here on a regular basis.)

2) People who registered and were regular posters but have gone dark for awhile.

3) Semi-lurkers who post occasionally.

4) V.I.P. registrations, who post occasionally.

5) People who registered, posted a couple of times or not at all, and have gone the way of The Tick and Action (but not Firefly!)

6) A few double registrations for Sang or other innocuous purposes.

7) Lurkers (who don't need registration.)

I'd be very interested to know how many people fall into some of these categories, and if there's a way to make registrations inactive subject to reactivation if they haven't posted/logged in for a significant period of time (say 3 or 6 months.)

The last few Mr. Polls have gotten a little over one hundred votes, and that doesn't account for any double votes. If there's barely one hundred people voting on things, I don't see how we can require fifty people for a quorum, especially when regardless of an abstension/present option, most people who don't have an opinion won't vote. For example if 29 people want a Clem is Hott thread, and 15 people don't, then automatically the 15 people win because the other 50 or so "active" posters really couldn't care less. And that's 29 pissed off, sexually frustrated, Buffistas of questionable taste with no outlet to vent those disturbing feelings. Do we really want to risk that?

Partial X-post with David and Burrell.

If people aren't registered then we can't track them can we? Or by Lurkers do you mean people who registered and then never used their accounts.

Also, are there accounts that were never verified or activated but are still counted on our total rolls? I can't remember if we do that or not.

I was wondering if ita or anyone else had decided to delete accounts that were inactive after a certain time period. I know other boards do that. I've regesitered at boards before and then only posted once or never posted and recieved emails that said my account was being deactivated because it had been inactive for so long.

For example if 29 people want a Clem is Hott thread, and 15 people don't, then automatically the 15 people win because the other 50 or so "active" posters really couldn't care less. And that's 29 pissed off, sexually frustrated, Buffistas of questionable taste with no outlet to vent those disturbing feelings. Do we really want to risk that?

I personally would be fine with that. I'm fairly sure, in fact, that this voting thing won't stop 29 people or so from being unhappy with the results of the vote.

There's no reason to deactivate accounts from a systems point of view. I don't believe we gain any speed or reduce the server load by doing so.

For example if 29 people want a Clem is Hott thread, and 15 people don't, then automatically the 15 people win because the other 50 or so "active" posters really couldn't care less. And that's 29 pissed off, sexually frustrated, Buffistas of questionable taste with no outlet to vent those disturbing feelings. Do we really want to risk that?

Me, I'm tending toward the conservative here. I don't want it to be that easy to make big changes. So I'd rather set the bar higher. And I bet we do have a couple of hundred regular posters/lurkers who might vote on stuff. So 50 doesn't seem like that high a bar to set.

I wasn't thinking of it for systems reasons, but rather for more an accurate count of how many users we have.

Because right now we keep saying we have X number of users, but if we have, say, 80 users that registered and never verified, verified & never posted, or posted once but not for 3 months, then I think we can count our total number of users as less those 80 names.

If people aren't registered then we can't track them can we? Or by Lurkers do you mean people who registered and then never used their accounts.

I meant that people registered and never posted, but there's another kind of lurker who never registers at all. (Hi guys)

So 50 doesn't seem like that high a bar to set.

Wrod.