Re: spoon-discuss: RE: spoon-business: The Daily Recognizer (Sunday morning)

["David E. Smith" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Jonathan Van Matre wrote:

> > For the time being, I'm not un-recognizing 306, because I
> > don't think it's
> > supposed to be done. I made an error of judgment the one time
> > I did it.
> > Feel free to replace it with a wholly different proposal...
>

> So you're saying you think proposals can't be withdrawn after being
> submitted?  The rules don't appear to explicitly prohibit that
> anywhere.  So by permissibility of the unprohibited, it should be
> allowed, no?

This is getting dangerously close to "Glotmorf's Wonderful World of
Bizarre/Irrational CFJs" territory here... :-)

First, I prefer, for at least limited scopes like this, a permissive
ruleset to a restrictive ruleset. It's not the sort of thing that would
work on a large scale (just try to imagine if the U.S. Code had to list
every single thing all people were permitted to do, instead of listing
things like murder and rape that people are prohibited from doing). On a
limited scope, it CAN work - the Missouri Wildlife Code is a permissive
system, and all the hunters/fishers/whatever are happy. (The poachers
aren't, obviously, but that's their own darn problem.)

Second, if proposals can be "un-recognized," it makes my life as the admin
harder. It means that, in the middle of the "current proposals" page,
there'll be an ugly "Proposal redacted"  note in the middle, and then I
have to remember to take it off the ballot, and it just ruins the whole
numbering system. Or that I have to come up with a good way to represent
it in the database that doesn't break everything else, and that doesn't
break my brain.

If there really is a substantial outcry for this sort of thing, I'll see
what I can do, but it shouldn't be a problem. There are plenty of things
that can be done that either need to be done, or are just really cool, so
as long as "I Want A Re-do!" doesn't pass, replacing lame proposal ideas
with not-so-lame ones should be an acceptable option for everyone.

I'll send out a batch of recognized stuff, including the aforementioned
do-over proposal, sometime this evening.

...dave