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I vote no, in terms of the question, for the reasons I have given elsewhere - Tom has suggested a mechanism he *does* have time for for letting new people onto the board:
There are - of course - loads of ways that we could handle this registration process without completely opening the doors. We could - for example - post up something that said something to the effect of "Barbelith is closed to new members at the moment - but if you've got a really good case for why you feel you shoudl be a member, chuck us an e-mail to this e-mail address". We could then have that e-mail address go to all the moderators, and they could chat to the people concerned to make sure that they're roughly who they say they are (ie. only limit to e-mail addresses being that it's either a work or a university or non-free e-mail address that indicates that they're vaguely identifiable by it). People chuck me a list once a week, and I'll send them an invitation e-mail.
which allows for a more gradual introduction of people with some engagement with the board. Opening the board unconditionally will just mean another year of dealing with insane trolling, which will be made more complicated by Tom not being around to delete suits.
So, open the board completely, if you want, if and when:
a) Somebody or bodies who are not Tom are given the power to freeze or kill suits.
b) Every banning will not immediately be challenged by the same troll in a different suit, with a rally of gullible Barbeloids muddying the waters around him with cries of "fascists!"
c) A mechanism exists at the registration stage to prevent mass registration of suits by one determined troll.
If you can't fulfil those basics, the board should not be opened unconditionally. Otherwise we probably get obsessive trolling targetting the people who have been here longest and dealt with it the most, who will have no power to prevent it and no guarantee that anyone with the power to prevent it will be around any time soon. Right now our chief troll has been reduced to trying to trick people out of their passwords. Unless he has developed a life in the last month and a half (last recorded attempt to break into Barbelith 29.12.04, remember?), the moment the board opens unconditionally that ceases to be the case within about ten minutes, and we have a year plus of multi-suit trolling to deal with. So, I vote for trying out Tom's proposed solution.
On a side note, I'm not wildly happy about the way this "referendum" has been declared. Is it expected that Tom should be bound by the numerical majority at the stroke of midnight on Friday? Or is this envisaged as just an opinion poll? |
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