DIYbanter - View Single Post

(Robert Bonomi) wrote in
rvers.com:

In article ,
John McCoy wrote:

The usually accepted meanings a

[YES] - I approve of this group and intend to read it
[NO] - I have some technical objection to the existance of the group
[ABSTAIN] - I have no objection to the group but also won't read it
[CANCEL] - I have previously voted and now wish to remove that vote

...

Notably that a yes vote implies that you *do* intend to read the
proposed group.

Over the years I have voted _for_ a number of groups that I had no
intention whatsoever of reading. Where there was a valid functional
division being drawn, and the new group was going to siphon off stuff
that I had no interest in. Creating that new group was going to get
the 'irrelevancies' (to me) out of the group that I _was_ reading -- a
'worthy' reason for creating it.

That misses the point of having a vote, however. The reason the vote
is held is so that the newsgroup administrators can determine if
there's enough potential users to justify creating a group. If the
group doesn't have enough users (readers & posters) it will die,
causing extra work for those maintaining newsservers (and probably
also failing to draw off your "irrelevancies" :-)

Which is why one's generally expected to vote yes only if they'll
at least read, if not post, the new group.

Of course, anyone's free to vote any way for any reason :-)

The 'cancel' description, above, is a bit misleading in that it would
seem to imply that if you wish to change your vote from 'yes' to 'no',
or vice-versa, that you need to 'cancel' the your prior vote, and then
submit your new one.

Yeah - getting it in one line was tricky. I was hoping that using
"remove" and not "replace" would get the point across that you only
need to use cancel if you don't want to have any vote entered.

John