I guess, like Jon, the quoted conditions seem to objective which is why my mind went to a numbers place.

I'd be curious to know how many people vote. Is there a general number or does it vary widely.

I just went back through Press announcements and the number of votes cast in some past votes (there should be a separate word for this) were: 65, 77, 93, 92, 59, 69, 49.

I did a quick scan of the past 10 votes (which appears to be all of them since April 2007) and the average number of votes cast was 72.5, max of 93 and min of 49.

It does seem to vary quite a bit. I wonder if we can assume that in the lower total votes, people just didn't care enough to vote? I guess even though the number varies a fair amount, I'd be inclined to select (through a vote, I suppose) a new "minimum required to pass" number.

I could start the Why Teppy Sucks thread!

Note: never let Perkins be a thread czar.

This is purely out of curiosity. And I realize it sounds a bit "big brother"ly. It's been raised a few times of "we have x number of members but only y number post on a regular basis". Is there a way Stompies could look at stats of some sort? Sort the member list by visits and posts? I say visits too for those that merely lurk. No clue if it's possible to look at those stats if they aren't somehow already built into the profile to collect. But an idea. Again, out of curiosity. But those figures could help set a bar for voting. Say 10%.?.?

I don't know if this is overstepping the bounds of anonymity, but from counting votes, there are hardly ever names I do not recognize as either current posters, people who used to post, or people who donated back in the day when we first built this board.

Not so surprising that a small percentage of users post and/or vote. There have always been a few unknown names when I vote counted, but the overwhelming majority were the active posters.

No clue how many active lurkers we have. No clue how many people registered then fled to the hills. There is a core of active users and voters. We make the decisions. We voted that 42 was the number of votes needed for a real vote.

It is likely that some users think it is too easy to take issues to vote, and that some think it is too hard. I thought that we hashed this all out when we went through the huge effort of creating our voting process. I'm not quite ready to go through it again, but I am in the camp that thinks our system works well enough.

We have seen lists of recent or active posters before, although maybe it was just in particular threads?

I'm willing to bet money that a vast majority of the people who vote are active members, and that low count votes are when people don't really care about the issues enough to vote, or they're unsure which way to vote. Let's face it - if you don't care about Gaming, I doubt many people would have waded through the several hundreds of posts in Lightbulbs about it.