But they're lurkers -- would they respond?

I dunno - but maybe with the anonymity they would. I might, were I a lurker. I wish I could ask them. You see the problem...

Let's avoid suburban sprawl.

eta: Which I realize now is not a bad metaphor. There are things which come from urban density that are lost when you let every subdivision just eat up the orange groves. What makes the most vital community for us?

This is a good analogy. I see people wanting their own houses on their own plots of land where they have everything they want-- everything at the right shade of whitefont, traffic slow enough for kids, only the things you want to discuss and nothing more. When that happens here I am outta here.

I am very frustrated. Polling is just our latest attempt to rush headlong into a new solution (see also: experimental threads). This is going to turn out badly, said Cassandra.

I don't get that, bon. I don't see how the polls are pushing any solution. I understand out this headlong rush could be seen as a side effect of the experimentals, but not the polls. Could you explain?

I don't see polling as a negative. It just gives us information we usually have to go through votes to get.

It's not binding. I really don't think I've got a picture of what our collective interests are. I'm disinterested in another vote about what individuals want, and am very curious about what we as a community want.

I'm not living or dying on any of these thread votes. But I'm willing to compromise a lot to keep the core vital.

Which I guess is something I need to articulate as an important community value from my perspective. I'm not necessarily interested in accommodating everybody or avoiding all frictions - I don't think that's possible. But if the community is lively/vital then it will deal with the changes. As long as people are invested they'll keep working on stuff even if they don't get what they want.

In the past I've felt that the lifeblood of the community is lively discussion so I've been pro-thread. Create places which foster discussion.

But I'm questioning that approach now. What if there is too much dilution? What if need to maintain a tighter focus to foster that vitality?

But I'm questioning that approach now. What if there is too much dilution? What if need to maintain a tighter focus to foster that vitality?

I think this is true, and there's no way in which polling will lead to that.

I don't expect us not to do a poll. I probably sound totally nuts right now. I'm not, though. This is an opportunity to put together a list of wants that gets us on our way to creating threads to fill perceived needs. In the process of getting everyone that perfect thread they want we will destroy what we have now.

Do we need to poll about frequency? We can tell which threads get the most posting traffic by looking at them. Is any of this data you're seeking anything we can pull from site stats?

I'm much too busy and frazzled to contribute much of value right now, but I do want to thank David for the sprawl metaphor. It's exactly right for my feelings about board growth, and it's the reason the thought of a dozen more single-show threads made me (metaphorically) cry when I was even more frazzled and not articulating real arguments yesterday.

I'm frazzeled too, and a little bit confused.

I think that one of the reasons voting may or may not work is very dependant on the individual proposer. The original idea of leaving the vote up to the proposer is, in my view, that they would take away a sense of the arguments and change and refine the vote until it could reflect all possibilities, which, in some ways, is certainly hindered by having to have a yes/no vote. It is a lot of work, and frankly the work of proposing the first vote about whether or not we should vote sucked a lot of the joy out of this board for me. I think we have gotten to the point where it is hard for one person to synthesize the arguments and I think this is what a poll would help.

Is there any kind of tool that can tell how often lurkers pull us up? I've begun wondering how many lurkers vote and whether we're just a big soap opera to someone out there who could care less what happens so long as we're entertaining. I've also wondered how many of our approximately 1500 members are actual accounts that check in on a weekly/monthly basis and how many are never used.

I really think this is a good idea.

In the last several polls about thread closure/creation we've had 100 or less people voting. I really think it would be helpful to find out how many people post/read the board on a regular basis vs how many people are voting.

Could we also do a poll that asked which threads people participate in? People are saying that Natter and Bitches are the core of the community, but I'd like to know how many people use other threads but don't consider Natter/Bitches their core board experience.

Someone, I think Bev, suggested posting announcements in all the threads and again I think that's a good idea. Yes, we have Press for these kinds of things, but there may be people who don't read Press and I think this discussion is important enough we really need to encourage people to participate in voting and the discussion since this is really important.