That rec.games.frp.pbn vote From: jha@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Jamie Andrews) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1989 09:41:47 +0000 While the 1-vote failure of r.g.f.p looks pretty arbitrary, let me make two points. First of all, there were 78 votes against it, which is more than in any such vote I can remember. (Can anyone name a more extreme vote? This must be in the top few, at least.) Normally, there aren't many people who care enough to vote against a newsgroup; with this one, there seem to have been a lot of people against it and not enough people for it. Secondly, while the 100-vote margin is dumb for boundary conditions, it seems just right for the current size of the net. 100 YES vs. 1 NO fails because there weren't even 101 people on the whole net who cared enough to vote YES. 1000 YES vs. 900 NO succeeds, stupidly -- but it's almost inconceivable that this would happen on the net as it is now. I would interpret the results more or less as follows: yes, there were a lot of gamers interested in creating it (for various reasons), but there were a lot of people on the net, including gamers, long-time readers, and administrators, who were so opposed to creating it (for various other reasons) that they voted against it. You can start up a push to change the voting rules, but since we just thrashed this out in painful detail on news.groups a few months ago, I wouldn't expect it to go far. --Jamie. jha@lfcs.ed.ac.uk "Let the flesh instruct the mind" Up