Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: Voting for new newsgroups
Keywords: vote new group
Message-ID: <1990Jan5.112408.27299@twwells.com>
Date: 5 Jan 90 11:24:08 GMT
References: <6355@sun.acs.udel.edu> <129878@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Distribution: usa
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 38

In article <129878@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> briang@sun.UUCP (Brian Gordon) writes:
: In article <6355@sun.acs.udel.edu> weave@sun.acs.udel.edu (Ken Weaverling) writes:
: >This should be an easy question!
: >
: >When there is a call for votes, who may vote? Is this just limited
: >to administrators of systems, or may common folk vote too?
:
: An easy one -- anyone who reads ("subscribes to") news.groups is allowed to
: vote, and anyone who has access to e-mail CAN vote.

There is nothing at all that says that you must subscribe to
news.groups in order to vote.

Anyone who is able to is allowed to vote. However, there is one
caveat: the vote is not like a vote in real life, in that all
concerned are obligated to abide by it. Rather, the vote is a way
that people who are responsible for their individual systems can
get a feel for whether they ought to allow a particular newsgroup.
Calling it a vote is something of a misnomer; "poll" would be a
better term.

So, if it were discovered that lots of people voted on a group
who had no real reason to vote, many system administrators are
likely to reject the vote results as not meaningful. The effect?
The newsgroup gets, at best, a poor distribution, and, at worst,
never gets created at all.

This, BTW, is not theoretical; just such a thing (with,
unfortunately, more than just vote-stuffing going on) happened
fairly recently. With the expected results.

To summarize: anyone who can send e-mail *may* vote; only those
who have reasons related to the group (or the net, as it applies
to the group) one way or the other *should* vote.

---
Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com