From: nop@alt.net 
  
 Kibo informs me that Bard  stated that: 
  
 >A long time ago,  pehaps when self conducted polls or shortly after 
 >UVV came into being, votes were invalidated bacause of "No Usenet 
 >Presense" .  This rule was discarded because lurkers do have the right 
 >to vote. 
  
 In discussions here about the CFV system, I keep on hearing people 
 talking about the 'right' of the lurkers to vote in CFVs, as though it's 
 a law of physics that's no more debatable than the law of gravity, 
 rather than just a reminder that Usenet was once small enough that there 
 was a fair chance that you'd actually met most of the people lurking in 
 your favourite newsgroup. 
  Why should people who do nothing at all to contribute to the collective 
 wisdom of a technical newsgroup have any say at all in how it's managed? 
 It's not like they're paying the participants to provide them with the 
 information or entertainment that motivates them to read that group. 
 Even the rawest newbie who posts nothing more to RPD than his dilemma 
 over which $150 digicam he should buy his teenage kid for xmas, 
 disappears for a few weeks, then posts a one line "Thanks for your 
 advice - my kid loves the camera I bought him" note a few weeks later 
 has done more to contribute to the well-being of the newsgroup than a 
 thousand lurkers. 
 As you in news.groups surely know, the single most important factor that 
 determines whether a newsgroup thrives or whithers is the community 
 created by the people posting in that group. Without the posters, a 
 newsgroup is nothing more than an entry in a bunch of configuration 
 files. 
  Deciding the fate of a CFV on the vote of people who've never posted to 
 any of the newsgroups involved in the CFV makes about as much sense as 
 pro football players following the 'advice' that the fans scream at them 
 while watching the game on TV. Even the trolls do more to contribute to 
 the Usenet body politic than the lurkers do, merely by virtue of the 
 fact that at least they actually participate in the process & have some 
 sort of stake in the outcome. 
  
 >Even if there was a descion to go back looking for a Usenet Presense, 
 >if one wanted to multi-vote all they would need to do is maintain two 
 >or more identities. 
  
 Which would be quite hard work. *Much* harder work than just setting up 
 a bunch of email accounts on a dozen different domains, which is all 
 that it takes to stack a CFV at present. I personally manage several 
 dozen domains for various organisations, so it'd be trivial for me to 
 create a voting bloc that'd be both bigger & less suspicious-looking 
 than that of the entire Stromboli clan. And these days, it's not all 
 that hard for any random, non-technical Usenetizen to rustle up half a 
 dozen email accounts by spending an afternoon Googling for free webmail 
 providers & signing up for accounts. 
  Now suppose, hypothetically, that the rules were changed to only permit 
 votes from people with at least a six month posting history in any of 
 the groups involved in the CFV. IMO, if a troll's both creative & 
 dedicated enough to create multiple identities & generate six months 
 worth of authentic-looking newsgroup presence for each of them, you 
 might as well acknowledge that they're going to beat any online system 
 you could possibly come up with, & just take comfort in the knowledge 
 that it's entirely possible that some other troll is doing the same 
 thing, but is voting the other way. 
  
 -- 
    W 
  . | ,. w ,   "Some people are alive only because 
   \\|/  \\|/     it is illegal to kill them."    Perna condita delenda est 
 ---^----^--------------------------------------------------------------- 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)