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.

One reason for setting the minyam at a fairly high level instead of just letting interest determine outcome (that is, five people want Clem is Hott, they vote on it and add the thread) is that we will probably need a brake on thread proliferation for technical reasons. I suppose that now that we're aware that our threadfulness is causing problems, folks will be conscious enough to vote down new threads unless they seem very necessary.

I suppose I could trust that once people get used to voting that folks will bother to vote on issues even if the issues aren't hugely important to them.

This might all become more clear when we establish the seconding procedure that would move discussion out of Bureaucracy into the Supreme Court thread. If we go that way (which is my preference) there will be a natural check on keeping us from getting Vote Crazy. Also, I'm really craving the time limit on the Supreme Court thread and focused discussion with beginning and end and voting and it's all damn settled.

I hate the idea of a Supreme Court thread because it seems like thread duplication to me.

I'm seeing a lot of suggestion that having a low minyan or none at all will mean that a small group of people can do things like add threads that the rest of us don't want. But if you're anti thread proliferation...vote against it. If 29 people want a Clem thread and only 15 of the rest of us can be arsed to vote against it, then I say let them have and on our own heads be it.

That's how I feel.

If that's how you feel, then you vote against quorum, but I don't think it's reasonable to decide, if quorum is passed, to make the number so small as to effectively render it meaningless.