I want to hear your feedback below from everyone. Based on what we get back, we'll roll improvements into future votes, or if need be, reset the vote and do it again; I know a lot of you are active here or at least more involved, so the relatively low turnout is a warning canary for me. Leave your comments below, and expect another story in a few days to see how we're using your comments.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Wednesday April 23 2014, @11:32PM
...we've had relatively small percentage (~10 percent) of members register to vote...
1) 10% of how many people? A hundred? A thousand? A hundred thousand? Percentage alone is pretty meaningless.
2) Having worked in many, many volunteer and/or non-profit settings: 10% is good. Very good. Most people honestly don't care or can't be bothered.
3) 2-4% are going to complain about any process and any choice of name. Accept that, move on.
4) There is no process so simple or intuitive that someone, somewhere won't get confused. Unless you find less than a hundred people voting I wouldn't lose any sleep.
5) Finally, if it's not already planned, please do a run off vote with maybe four or five finalists. I expect that many people look at that endless list and go "Lord no...."
(I admit to reading only enough of the instructions to figure out how to vote. The rest I ignored.)
(Score: 2) by ancientt on Wednesday April 23 2014, @11:55PM
I have two accounts, I only set one up to vote because I want to be fair. I really want to vote a couple thousand times or just get asked to pick the final name, but I recognize the difference between what I like and what is best for the community (even if my opinion is actually the best one.)
I didn't submit a different name because I couldn't find any available domain name better than a couple of the suggestions I liked.
I didn't find the email process too cumbersome or unreasonable. I understand the goal is to prevent ballot stuffing and get a reasonable proximity to "one vote per interested person." I'm okay with it. Yes, I'd do it differently, but you're running a website that solicits the opinions of capable and opinionated geeks, so I think that's probably true for most of us. When all is said and done, I think what was done works as a first step toward final name selection and that is what I want as a primary goal.
How do I think I would have set it up? I think a poll with the prompt to ACs to "Login if you want to vote" and a plus/minus ranking system in HTML with a note that your vote won't be counted until you confirm by clicking a link sent to your registered email. I wouldn't have included the current domain in the voting, but noted that it would be in the runoff and in the runoff I would have listed it as "incumbent" where all the others showed how many votes they garnered in the primary. Maybe my ideas would have gotten more voting activity, maybe they would have been more intuitive and maybe they would have been even more successful, but maybe then again maybe not.
Bottom line is that what you did works and that's what I care about most.
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(Score: 2) by xlefay on Thursday April 24 2014, @05:10PM
It's more like, 8% out of 4229 (as of this moment) people (well, I suppose there could be a few bots in there!).
(Score: 2) by AudioGuy on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:34PM
'Finally, if it's not already planned, please do a run off vote with maybe four or five finalists. I expect that many people look at that endless list and go "Lord no...."'
Yes: http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=1177&cid=30 259 [soylentnews.org]
Answer to question #1 -
507 checked the box and have been sent ballots etc. Another 18 have been added manually (people who were gone, or misread instructions, etc)
Out of 4116 registered users at the time the time the vote started.
I haven't counted the complainers. 146 comments to this thread, not all complaints of course.
Too early to tell how many voted. Will post full stats at the end.
Your comment gave me hope. :-)