I think the harm comes in opening up the possibility of re-examining old decisions. Where do we draw the line? I remember there were quite a few people who were for a general TV thread. Eventually it didn't happen. That decision would seem, to me, to be tabled for whatever the period is that we decide in this next vote. But if we let the War thread come up for discussion/voting, then those folks would have a legitimate beef in saying "Well what about the General TV thread?" We want a vote now, too. War got one?" And movies and music threads both had significant oppostion that got overridden by the consensus model we had before. Could they now come back and say, "We want to revisit the decision to have a movies/music thread. It was part of the reason for the crash. There are a lot of anti-thread proliferation people and we didn't get a fair hearing. We want to vote now."? I mean, where does it stop?

Jengod, if you can come up with better short slugs for the right-hand column threads, I think that would be fab.

These "lack of decisions" funded and coded and tested this damned board. Similar lacks of decisions have sent money to charity and cute clothes to the kids of ME writers. Flowers to Firefly cast members. Organised one and a half face to faces.

Sure, I think voting can work better, but there's no way you can convince me that nothing that preceded this decision can stand on its own.

By putting quotes around the word "decision", I mean in no way to belittle all the hard work that went into making this board and the charity and other fund raising efforts. I've even participated in some of the fund raising (not as much as I should, probably.) If my posts were taken that way, I apologize for giving that impression.

My only question was: when does a few people agreeing on something become a consensus, and when does that become a decision. That hasn't been answered to my satisfaction, but since everyone else seems to know the answer, I'll shut up about it. At least for tonight.

Ita, you are a goddess. Please don't get the idea that I don't appreciate everything you and the other techs have done with this place.

Part of the idea of having a process is that we not do anything hastily, anything that won't last. If you really think the need for a War Talk Thread will be gone in 3 weeks, then it wasn't something worth creating in the first place. Threads are built for endurance.

Nutty! Kisses to you on this.

God. I'm so angered by this that I cannot believe it. In fact, I am aware that we've lost a poster over this who had her registration deleted because she just can't handle this level of bickering.

I also do feel like reassessing this decision sets, as Hec said, a precedent for reassessing every decision previously made. I could make an argument that since there wasn't an "offical" votey consensus on whether or not to make this a public board before we moved here that we could discuss and debate and remove people beneath a certain number because it was never formally approved.

I'm not saying that I believe that, but if we can second guess what happened with the war thread, we can second guess most things.

It literally pisses me off so much that it makes me want to punch things.

"We want to revisit the decision to have a movies/music thread. It was part of the reason for the crash. There are a lot of anti-thread proliferation people and we didn't get a fair hearing. We want to vote now."?

Jesus kat! You're brilliant. Seriously that's wonderful. I'm proposing this.

Bicyclops said:

when does a few people agreeing on something become a consensus, and when does that become a decision.

I answered that to the best of my ability in post 8519:

The same way it was known the old way. Either, as some suggested, the loudest and longest decided it; or, because people's minds were changed and/or more people agreed with the final decision that was implemented. They're the same thing from two different perspectives.

If voting hadn't been implemented, the war thread would have been considered dead until someone else brought it up. Voting has been implemented, but that doesn't negate the effect of the earlier decision just because this is the first thing that's come up that someone wants to overturn.

Those who didn't like the old version of consensus can, from this point forward, change things that have not been decided. Consensus was that nothing previous to the implementation of the voting method would be changed.

The War Thread shouldn't go up for a vote until the end of the tabling period.

I know I have a list of "shit I didn't win on", and why not attack that once we've voted on whether or not to keep Music or Movies?

I know that proponents feel more intensely about the war than I do about movies, but that's no reason to change our decision to not change our decisions.

Oh! and if are truly able to revisit decisions not previously voted on but decided by consensus, can we also vote on whether or not we should even have allowed a discussion of voting in the first place, thereby nullifying the vote to allow us to vote?

It would be like getting bureaucracy to eat its own tail.

I think it's been presented very clearly why voting on the War Thread RIGHT NOW is problematic and sets a very bad precedent. The very ferocity of the debate, it seems to me, indicates that this is a sore point for a lot of people. And the sore point isn't the War Thread per se, it is the idea that, if someone doesn't like the way consensus/the vote turned out, he/she should raise it again a little bit later.

"From beneath you, it devours." It really is all connected.