Lets try a vote in the SC style

While I made a video about the voting process, I note no one has tested it yet. We should do that :stuck_out_tongue:

Let’s have something controbversial - choice of editor! Let’s also assume for a moment that we’ve had plenty of discussion and we’re many posts into the discussion, and we’re down to Vi, Emacs, VSCode, and “other”. It’s time for a vote!

Could a @SteeringCommittee try setting up an SC vote please? That is, one poll limited to SC members with public voting, and one vote for everyone else. Thanks!

Steering Committee Vote
  • vim/neovim
  • vscode/vscodium
  • emacs
  • other
0 voters
Community Vote
  • vim/neovim
  • vscode/vscodium
  • emacs
  • other
0 voters

Oooh, even Admins can’t abuse privs and vote:

(I mean, I could add myself to the SC group but … at least I can’t misclick :stuck_out_tongue:)

One question: are other steering committee members able to edit posts or change the poll close date or something else? We had edit privileges in community-topics.

I guess we should also start a community-topics ticket/vote to formally agree on moving the community-topics stuff to the forum before proceeding. We had [Vote ended on 2023-03-27] Use a forum to build project-wide participation & discussion · ansible-community/community-topics · Discussion #211 · GitHub, but that wasn’t anything concrete.

I can look into that tomorrow. If we were using a category-per-team then we could make the SC category-moderators, but that doesn’t work for a tag. I’ll see what I can do, we’ll figure it out.

Do you feel we’ve done enough testing for that? Also do you want to wait until this is public (which will not be long)?

No, I think it’s a bit early to vote. I’m just saying I want to make sure we establish formal consensus before officially switching everything over.

2 Likes

So, this breaks down into (a) edit rights for various trust-levels in general, and (b) what you can do with polls, and how these two intersect.

In general, you get more edit rights as you spend time in the forum (you can see this post for a high level overview and this post for all the detailed defaults). As SC members, we regard you as trusted members of the community, so you’ve already been set to TL3, which grants you power over recategorising, retagging, & renaming topics, as well as making wikis, and more. And TL1+ can always edit their own posts.

Potentially I could see an argument for SC members to be TL4 (which has no automatic promotion, it has to be given), or even made forum moderators - that’s a debate we need to have, along with other highly-active people. Either of those would grant you the power to edit post bodies from other people, which may be required - or if it’s infrequent, perhaps just using the Flag button to ask staff for help could work too.

That’s editing in general. However most of this doesn’t apply to polls - even as an admin, I can’t edit a poll once it’s more than 5 minutes old (that can be altered, but I approve of the idea in general, so I wouldn’t want to set it to something huge). That’s because changing a poll usually invalidates the existing votes, so Discourse enforces it. As such, none of us can edit an existing poll, we can only make new ones.

One exception to this is the CloseAt property, which auto-closes a poll. That also cannot be changed after the 5min grace period, and once the poll closes it cannot be re-opened. Contrast that to an open-ended poll, which is closed manually but can then be re-opened if needed.

So the question I would ask back is “what sort of edits are you doing on GitHub?” and also perhaps “how often do you find that needed?”

If it’s around clarifying options, improving wording, etc, then we can replicate that - the body of the post can still be edited to add notes, especially if subsequent discussion reveals a misunderstanding in the vote. But if it’s changing a poll-in-progress, then those will need to be closed and restarted. The one gray area is on auto-close, since that can’t be edited later but manual-close is … well, manual.

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OK now I want to know what “other” @felixfontein is using :smiley:

I think the polls are still open, at least I can still undo my vote and vote again. Is this correct?

What happens if the polls are closed manually? Does it really stop people from voting and we still see the result? Since this is just a test, maybe we should just try it out.

A good question @mariolenz! You are indeed allowed to change your vote so long as the poll is still open - after all, other people may have changed your view :wink:

What you can’t do is change the poll itself once it’s posted (there’s a 5min grace period for typo edits, but that’s all). This is because changing the poll could invalidate the existing votes, so Discourse blocks that and instead you have to close the old poll and create a new one.

I’ve closed both polls now, so you shouldn’t be able to alter the votes now (not even admins can, you’d have to actually mess with the DB to do that)