Sooooo tempted to vote ...

@lilomar: I loled

per the second change. This was changed the other way for good reason: it means that if someone DEFERENTIALs on their own proposal, then if the High-Programmer votes AGAINST the proposal becomes self-killed, which makes no sense. I also don’t see how it helps achieve the desired goal.

It actually DOES make sense: Voting DEF on your own Proposal means you are putting full faith in the High-Programmer, which includes the possibility of Self-Killing.

@Qwazukee: It caused a huge storm when I s/ked someone else’s proposal during one of my dynasties (my first?), and the rule was changed for that reason.

I only have a vague recollection of that incident, but it’s not a serious problem. If you don’t want someone self-killing your Proposal, don’t vote Def on it!

@ais523: I agree with Qwaz, why would you vote DEF if you didn’t want to go with the High-Programmers vote?

@lilomar: To abstain on your own proposal. Voting DEF does not go along with the High-Programmer’s vote on your own proposal with this change; it goes along with a FOR vote, but causes an AGAINST vote to kill the proposal altogether.

If you are that wishy-washy about the proposal, you should have thought twice about proposing it. I can see the argument for letting someone vote abstain, or even against their own cfj or dov, but not a proposal.

@lilomar: It’s been done when people fix each other’s proposals, IIRC.

Per Ais, and per the past quorum who voted for that particular change. It doesn’t seem that good to put the Emperor in a situation where they can’t vote against something without killing the proposal.

It’s your own Proposal. If you Propose something, you should either be willing to support it or you should Self-Kill it. Don’t Propose things that you think are so questionable that even you do not necessarily support them.

Let me point out a flaw in this system. If I voted DEF on this Proposal and Keba also voted DEF, we would have the same votes but they would mean completely different things. Does no one see a problem with this?

If the ability to explicitly abstain from something is so important, we should make another Voting Icon to represent that and add an appropriate clause to the Voting rule.

I agree with Citizen Qwazukee-R, DEF means defer to the High-Programmer. No reason to overload it with so many other meanings in special circumstances.

In addition, adding an ABSTAIN vote would allow for canceling past votes by anyone, not just the High-Programmer and proposal author, which is a possibility that does not currently exist. If we want to allow explicit abstinence in those cases, why not for everyone?

Also, my 2c is that the open.gif icon would do well for an ABSTAIN voting icon. (both the current and the default ones)

2c == 2 credits, btw.

[Qwazukee] As Ais says, it’s been used before when proposing something on behalf of someone else; you may wish to help out a slot-lacking player by reproposing a fixed version of something, even if you didn’t have any strong opinions on it. We can fix the problem in a way that still allows the proposer to vote DEF if they want to.

And I may be misjudging common usage, but I think DEF is used in practice to mean both “the Emperor should decide this, perhaps because it has a clause that would require extra work from him, perhaps because I the voter am unsure how whether this fits his dynasty” and “I am not sure, but rather than slowing the queue by not voting, I will let the trusted Emperor decide on my behalf”. Which seems fine - a FOR vote can mean dozens of things, including “I have studied this and it is a useful addition to the ruleset”, “haven’t got time to read this but most people seem to be voting FOR”, “Bucky told me on IRC to vote for this”, “ha, this flavour text is hilarious” and everything else.

If someone else doesn’t have enough slots to Propose something, but it has enough support to pass, one of the people who actually does support (which is theoretically more than half the population of Blognomic) will propose it. It doesn’t require someone who does not support it to get involved.

And while FOR, DEF, and AGAINST can all have different impetuses, for the purpose of counting votes they should mean the same thing (aka a DEF is a DEF is a DEF). It just doesn’t make sense to have one DEF be a FOR vote and one DEF be no vote at all.