From: kozlowsk@acs.ucalgary.ca (Don M. Kozlowski)
Subject: Re: Newsgroup creation guidelines
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 93 18:19:22 GMT
Organization: The University of Calgary, Alberta

In article <1993Jan06.200341.52038@watson.ibm.com> strom@Watson.Ibm.Com (Rob Strom) writes:
[...]
>My proposal is designed to address only the problem
>about labelling.  

Well then change to Subject line on all calls for votes to be:
CFV: Ignore this at your peril!

>
>As to your first sentence, nothing in my proposal would
>have prevented the ballots from having a rationale explaining
>that if the alt.guitar renaming and the rec.music.synth
>renaming took effect, there would be one consolidated
>rec.music.makers group.  In fact, most ballots include
>a preamble containing such a rationale.

But if there are two or more ballots, I then have to find both of
them, vote on each of them, wait for both replies from the
autopreply daemon or check both interim vote announcements to be
sure they both arrived. The vote taker has to check two sets of
votes for duplicates, forgeries, invalid or ambigous votes. Reply
or set up autoreply daemons for two separate votes. Post twice
the number of vote acks. Naturally we'd have twice as many chains
discussing the votes in progress...

All this because someone ignores a CFV because he didn't think it
would affect him. Since there were two transactions posted to
rec.musc.synth with explicit subject lines warning that the name
of the group rec.musc.synth may be changed, I don't agree that
the misleading subject line is the problem.

>But if "the way things work" is confusing and requires
>extra work on the part of the user, then "the way things
>work" ought to be changed.  This is true whether we
>are talking about an automobile, a piece of software,
>or the Usenet voting procedures.
>
>Just for the record, the documentation which says one should read any CFV
>regardless of its subject line was written AFTER the vote.

If the documentation now mentions CFV's the problem has already
been solved. There is no longer any need to complicate voting
procedures. 


>
>And the requirement that one should read any CFV regardless
>of its subject line, while it may be today "the way things work",
>is not from Sinai, and if it's a potential stumbling block,
>should be changed.  Why keep even a documented misfeature
>around using the excuse "well they should know how to
>use the system or else they shouldn't be here"?  And you
>haven't really made a good case that it's not a misfeature
>to allow CFVs for renaming one group to be labelled with
>the name of a completely different group.

So use meaningful subjects. Don't complicate voting. I'm still
not convinced that a meaningful subject will help no matter how
many ballots the vote is split into. Lets be sure we know what
the problem is before applying solutions.

>
>Usenet isn't meant to be an obstacle course.

Right, so lets not make it more complicated than it already is.

>-- 
>Rob Strom, strom@watson.ibm.com, (914) 784-7641
>IBM Research, 30 Saw Mill River Road, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY  10598


-- 
Don Kozlowski	                 	Phone: (403) 220-5156
Academic Computing Services		Fax:   (403) 282-9199
The University of Calgary