From: nobody@vote.munitions.com Newsgroups: alt.discuss,alt.discuss.config,alt.discuss.announce Subject: A.D CHANGE: Time to Switch Followup-To: alt.discuss.config Date: 11 Dec 1999 13:00:03 -0800 Organization: WebTV Networks, Inc. Lines: 47 Approved: nobody@vote.munitions.com Message-ID: <82ue0j$cpm$1@newssorter-101.private.bryant.webtv.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: newssorter-101.bryant.webtv.net I believe that the time has come to switch to the new voting site and the new voting rules. Effective immediately, you can no longer propose new newsgroups via the email mechanism. You will still be able to vote and cancel proposals until 1 AM PST Sunday, Dec. 12. After the vote tally is posted and any proposal changes become effective at 1 AM PST, Sunday, Dec. 12, the email-based voting mechanism will be shut down and all of the ongoing proposals will be moved to the new site. There will be a brief period of testing to make sure that the existing proposals have been transferred successfully, after which the new site, http://www.munitions.com/~advotes/advotes.cgi will be available for use. (If you can get into it, your can use it. Access will be turned off until it's ready.) When you visit the new site after the transition, you may notice that some of the vote tallies are lower than they were at the final 1 AM posting from the old system. This is because part of the transition process involves removing "neutral" votes (votes both for and against a proposal from the same box.) The new system doesn't know how to deal with this situation, so they have to be removed. The only case in which this would affect a vote outcome is if the group had been proposed more than 7 days before and the only "yes" vote cast had been neutralized by a "no" vote from the same box. This would result in the vote being cancelled at the 1 AM tally run. You will also notice (if everything works the way it's supposed to) that the transferred proposals will still have 60-day voting periods. I don't believe that it would be fair to impose the new 30-day voting period on groups that were proposed under the old rules. All groups proposed through the new site will be subject to the 30-day voting period rule. The complete set of new voting rules will be posted in a separate article today and should be available on the new site tomorrow. It's likely that there are still bugs in the new system. Before you report a bug, ALWAYS do a "reload" to make sure it isn't the result of hitting "back". (To reload, do cmd + "r" on the WebTV keyboard, or click on the reload button in the options panel.) If you still think it's a bug, please check in news:alt.discuss.config first to see if someone else has already reported the same problem. If you're the first, please post an article describing the problem. Please include "BUG" in the Subject line. If you have questions, please post in news:alt.discuss.config and I'll try to answer them using the "nobody-munition" account.

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