SB 28-23: Increasing Requirements Act (Passed)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Regarding Ishan's complaint of validity posting, one of my longest running ideas on that front is to force posts counting towards validity to be done in 2 separate months (so for example for these April midterms you'd need to have at least 1-2 posts in March and 1-2 posts in April out of your 8 validity posts)

That would instantly kill any sort of validity posting (and if it doesn't it could get even more stringent, like requiring 1 post every fortnight on the 2 months before an election) at the cost of making things harder to track for Peebs.

Basically it would require people not just to post 8 posts, but also to post them in a consistent basis, not all at once.

But like YE and Yankee said, not all validity posters come from Discord and not all posters form Discord need validity.

Short of raising activity requirements to something truly insane which I don't think many would support (like say, 25 posts over the past 2 months, with at least 5 of those posts split on a separate month) I don't think there is any way to fight off those cliques.

My issue with those voters (which Ishan probably shares) is that they don't really care about Atlas and just come to support their friends. You have to draw the line of "caring enough about Atlas to be allowed to vote" somewhere but it a line that is very hard (if not impossible) to draw.

Another issue is that they are literally impossible to convince or campaign for their vote unless you happen to be in their clique since they won't read Atlas PMs at all. At least with "Random forum Fed Zombie" you can hope that they'll flip after reading a campaign PM but that is not the case with someone in a clique. This certainly goes against the spirit of what Atlasian elections should be; though elections moving from persuation to turnout has happened over a very long period of time that definitely predates the rise of Discord in 2017-18.

Either way probably something for another bill or a constitutional amendment, especially given how activity requirements are set in the constitution and not legislation?

In my view, registration requirements would tackle the problem of offsite voters while activity requirements would be the ones to tackle zombie voters (including but not limited to those on Discord cliques).

Something like that with the posting every fort night would certainly murder Peebs in terms of the arduous task of tracking posts by date for 300 players. We have to remember that while Peebs is likely to remain for a long time, sooner or later she might leave that post and then finding someone to fill that post would be that much more difficult.

This is another thing that post reset people have become spoiled on, but we used to struggle with filling SoFE at times just like we struggled more recently with filling the GM.

[Former President tack50]

Something like that with the posting every fort night would certainly murder Peebs in terms of the arduous task of tracking posts by date for 300 players. We have to remember that while Peebs is likely to remain for a long time, sooner or later she might leave that post and then finding someone to fill that post would be that much more difficult.

This is another thing that post reset people have become spoiled on, but we used to struggle with filling SoFE at times just like we struggled more recently with filling the GM.

Yeah, sadly I can't think of any ways to fix the validity posting voters that don't involve stupidly high activity requirements (something like 50 posts on 2 months to vote?), making Peebs' job a living hell or both

I do think that "posts on 2 separate months" would not be that much harder to track (every fortnight would be a living hell though), but Peebs' job is already hard enough that people shouldn't make it any harder.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Something like that with the posting every fort night would certainly murder Peebs in terms of the arduous task of tracking posts by date for 300 players. We have to remember that while Peebs is likely to remain for a long time, sooner or later she might leave that post and then finding someone to fill that post would be that much more difficult.

This is another thing that post reset people have become spoiled on, but we used to struggle with filling SoFE at times just like we struggled more recently with filling the GM.

Yeah, sadly I can't think of any ways to fix the validity posting voters that don't involve stupidly high activity requirements (something like 50 posts on 2 months to vote?), making Peebs' job a living hell or both

I do think that "posts on 2 separate months" would not be that much harder to track (every fortnight would be a living hell though), but Peebs' job is already hard enough that people shouldn't make it any harder.

Not too much harder applies to other considerations in this matter as well though.