Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!whuts!homxb!hropus!ki4pv!tanner From: tanner@ki4pv.uucp (Dr. T. Andrews) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Posting and Counting Votes (was: Re: OFFICIAL Proposal for creation of Rec.Arts.Cartoons) Summary: similar to old ideas on voting. one interesting twist. Message-ID: <7042@ki4pv.uucp> Date: 24 Sep 88 13:39:57 GMT References: <4808@juniper.uucp> Organization: CompuData Inc., DeLand Lines: 44 In article <4808@juniper.uucp>, yelorose@juniper.uucp (Bob Mosley III) writes: ) Newsgroups: news.admin,rec.arts.comics,rec.arts.anime,rec.arts.tv,rec.arts.startrek,talk.bizarre ) Votes will be counted only if received via E-Mail, or if a voter ) cannot find an alternative path to this address, which does happen I am not sure that it is good form to count votes which are posted (instead of mailed) under any circumstances. However, there are no doubt people (as indicated above) who may indeed count such votes, possibly with the best intentions of being fair and otherwise generally adhering to the common rules of net voting. I would like to see a scheme in place whereby someone else (besides the newsgroup proponant) be given the task of collecting votes. Pure "vote" messages should be easily tabulated mechanically based on the "subject" line; any included text could be peeled out and forwarded to someone else. Can it be done, you ask? Well, I have a more complex mail- reading daemon around which figures out based on mail propagation which of our customer sites may be having problems. Picking out three items ("vote", "yes" or "no", and "news.group.name") should not be much of a challenge. Before voting starts, but after the discussion period, the central vote administrator would be contacted, given the newsgroup name and a person to whom comments might be forwarded. Then, votes (yes or no) would be mailed to the magical address (say, "votes@lucky_site"), where they would be tabulated and the comments forwarded. One advantage to such a scheme (the one which prompted this fast-growing article) is that such a device is sure to NOT count posted votes. Not even votes posted with the text "I tried every possible mailpath 15 times, and it always bounced" would be counted. Even votes with the text "my mailer is broken, so please count this vote" would go unheeded. Perhaps the "uunet" folks could be imposed upon to set up such a mailbox? (I might be willing to provide a tolerably crude script or program to count the votes and keep the voter list.) -- ...!bikini.cis.ufl.edu!ki4pv!tanner ...!bpa!cdin-1!cdis-1!ki4pv!tanner or... {allegra killer gatech!uflorida decvax!ucf-cs}!ki4pv!tanner