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posted by NCommander on Wednesday April 23 2014, @10:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the apt-get-install-democracy dept.
I wanted to get feedback on how the community feels about our current name vote. There have been some concerns that we've had relatively small percentage (~10 percent) of members register to vote, and wanted to see if there was something more fundamental going on. As it is currently setup, here's how things are
  • You had to be registered by April 12th to have been included in the name vote; if you received a ballot for submission, you should have gotten ranking ballot
  • We haven't retroactively added in additional users, though it hasn't been clear that there was a hard cutoff
  • The submission phase went until the 19th, and the vote for the name will continue until the 27th
  • The current system is email only (but we are looking at getting something integrated into the website implemented for future votes)

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.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by michealpwalls on Thursday April 24 2014, @12:01AM

    by michealpwalls (3920) on Thursday April 24 2014, @12:01AM (#35260) Homepage Journal

    I voted 9 for SoylentNews, however I hadn't realized until fairly late in the voting that you had to opt-in in the SoylentNews user preferences. If I didn't put a check in that box, would I have missed the vote entirely?

    The one thing I think that was missing from the actual voting system was some feedback. A simple confirmation of success or fail is all.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=1, Underrated=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 1) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday April 24 2014, @04:25AM

    by The Archon V2.0 (3887) on Thursday April 24 2014, @04:25AM (#35353)

    > I hadn't realized until fairly late in the voting that you had to opt-in in the SoylentNews user preferences.

    Wait, what user preference?

    (Looks.)

    Dammit! I hadn't noticed that setting before!

  • (Score: 2) by clone141166 on Thursday April 24 2014, @07:01AM

    by clone141166 (59) on Thursday April 24 2014, @07:01AM (#35383)

    This is a good point. Seeing as it's already optional whether or not you choose to reply to the voting email, maybe the participate-in-votes user preference should be enabled by default? Sending all registered users voting emails by default, until they expressly opt-out of ever receiving voting emails via the user preference.

    I know everything about the voting process was mentioned. But tbh much more needs to be done to simplify the voting process. Parts of it are complicated and other parts are unintuitive and contrary to established precedents. Voting should essentially be the easiest thing to do on the web site, otherwise people will either be confused or simply not participate.

  • (Score: 1) by MrNemesis on Thursday April 24 2014, @12:13PM

    by MrNemesis (1582) on Thursday April 24 2014, @12:13PM (#35481)

    Ditto; I saw all the talk of a vote and judging by my join date I should have been eligible, but there was never a list of names, never any mention of where to go to to vote and once it became apparent it was all done over email, it's only your post that indicated to me that in order to be eligible I needed to tick the "willing to vote" button which, like so many other I suspect, I had never seen until I went looking for it - I set my prefs up when I joined the site and don't hop back into them every day.

    Le sigh.

    --
    "To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."