Well, lurkers do get a say -- any registered person can vote, when we vote. And lurkers do vote. Not in huge numbers, but I think that's fine. I lurk elsewhere, too, and I probably wouldn't vote there, if there were voting there. Because I'm not part of the community. And that's fine, too.

But I do disagree with your interpretation, and I do intend to point that out.

Of course. I wouldn't expect anyone not to if they disagreed with me.

Fair enough and I'm sorry for misinterpreting you, Denise.

No big deal. It's easy to take things more personally than they were intended in the heat of all of this, I think. All's good as far as I'm concerned.

In my book, voting is delurking.

Yes, people who registered yesterday have the same voting power as I do. Kinda annoying, but there's no fix for it that doesn't fuck up more than it addresses.

Back when we instituted voting we just basically said, "If a huge influx of locusts registers and tries to take over the board by exploiting our agreed upon voting system we'd just ignore them."

The structure is there to serve us. If there's an obvious abuse then we wouldn't abide by it.

In my book, voting is delurking.

I guess, but if you've never counted votes, you've still never heard of them.

Is the last 100 people who signed up having a different opinion than the first 50 who signed up abuse? Whether they signed up over a year or the last half an hour?

I think the idea is that we'd kind of be able to tell if it was 5 people and their 50 sockpuppets.

Ack. Stop constructing hypothetical disaster scenarios. It's freaking me out.

Technically I've heard of everyone, because I get to see the user lists and the registration emails.

On the flip side if they post where I can't see them they are invisible to me, but they have an impact on the board. I feel the same way about donating money, although I think the amount has squat to do with it.

They've made their persistent existence known in some way other than using bandwidth.

Sean, technically I could do numbers like the ones you mention, but there'd probably be a disconnect because unique visitors can be a muddier number than the ones we track explicitly.

When we were coming up with plans to discipline people (if necessary) some of these same fears were brought up. At the time it was, what if there are a bunch of new people who want to take over the board and try to get existing users banned or suspended?

We worked around that issue and luckily it hasn't happened. I'm pretty sure it's going to be the same thing with the voting issue.