For me, it is not the case that "abstain" implies "refrain from voting forever" and not "refrain from voting for now". I kinda guess it comes down to how you internally model the concept of "election" with regard to PM. If you consider a node to be an election, then abstaining means deciding to never vote on that node (vs. just waiting to maybe cast your vote). If you consider each time you view a node as a potential new election, then just because you abstained in previous elections doesn't mean you will continue to abstain in future elections involving that same node. But I guess that not being able to vote in a future election just because you voted previously may present a problem for such an internal model.

But perhaps it also comes from actively deciding to refrain vs. just not bothering to (yet). If one feels that "deciding to not decide (yet) is still a decision", then to "refrain" is probably more likely to imply "refrain for now".

If we eventually offer an "I will never vote on this" option, then it will need to avoid XP benefits (including the "cast all votes" benefit). I lean toward it costing more than "one vote" as well... And do we add a feature to show how many people have opted out of voting on each node? (:

But I don't think I can call such an option simply "abstain". Too bad my thesaurus does not list "recuse", as I find that it comes closer in some respects. But thesauring "abstain" brings up "abjure" which sounds promising (or the even less common "abnegate"). 

  ( )++ ( )-- (.)defer ( )abjure

[download]

- tye        

In reply to Re^3: Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good (abstain) by tye
in thread Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good by lostjimmy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.