Subject: MN: Re: Voting Strategy

From: "Wayper, Paul" <WayperP@p...>
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 08:43:36 +1000

On Thursday, June 24, 1999 7:10 PM, dunx@d... [SMTP:dunx@d...]
wrote:
> Would web based voting help? If I posted a CGI form which had a radio
> button for each Proposal and kept track of who had voted? (obviously not
> on the Xoom site)

This sort of system had been set up on Thring and IMHO is a Good Thing. If
you can do this I shall gild your statue in my personal shrine and keep
lighted candles burning around it twenty-four hours a day.

In some ways I think if we can get a tame server for CGI then we can start
automating some of these tasks, so that Proposals get submitted to a CGI
script which places them on the board for voting and so on. I'm always
'for' automating the tasks of the Speaker.

> The problem with that is authentication - I'd be a bit dubious about using
> passwords because they're so easily forgotten. A possible solution would
> be to have the Voter enter their email address, partly so that I can tell
> who has actually submitted the Votes and partly to send a copy of the
> message to the Voter.

*shrugs* At Thring I can't remember exactly how it was set up - obviously
forging people's addresses was much more of a concern in the competitive
world of Thring than in our more communal MN. I think you had to enter your
email address and a confirmation of your votes was mailed out and had to be
replied to. I have no objection to an initial confirmation and then use of
cookies for authentication, or a password system (I have so many passwords
I've invented a system for generating passwords for new sites that's easy
for me to remember but hard for other people to guess. It's an computer
thing.)

> I would not put this forward as a replacement for the current system, but
> it might be useful as an adjunct.

I'm quite happy to have both. When Thring had the email system some of the
tasks of the speaker were automated by the Speaker at the time using CGI
scripts and so forth. A neat little Perl script that could analyse an
incoming Votes mail and record the votes of a player simply would be
something that would be eternally useful, I'd imagine.

Or am I proposing too many technical and programming solutions to things?

Paul Wayper -- DPI ITS Computer Systems Officer
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---

From: Dunx <dunx@d...>
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 08:01:05 +0100

>lighted candles burning around it twenty-four hours a day.

Well, if it's been done before then I'm fairly sure it's doable :-)

>'for' automating the tasks of the Speaker.

Well so am I, obviously. It's setting aside the time to redesign processes
that's the difficult thing at the moment.

Anyway, you may gather that dunx.org is CGI-capable. I just haven't done
anything with its capabilities yet.

>something that would be eternally useful, I'd imagine.

Also quite unlikely, I think - the formats of voting mails vary widely.

There have been various attempts to automate the counting process, though -
Kevan had his QBasic program, I got about half way through writing a Perl
tool for the same purpose (which was too ambitious, the probable reason why
it never got finished), and Snow has written a neat little program to do
the same thing. Due to the process inertia I mentioned earlier, I'm not
using any of these aids at the moment.

>Or am I proposing too many technical and programming solutions to things?

I'm not going to start pointing the finger, given my own tendency to
over-technologise.

--
Dunx
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