I never really was involved in auto editor elections anyway, but back when we still had mailing lists I would at least get an email about upcoming elections. I just came across the election page and I noticed that @loujin has some trouble getting seconders. Which isn’t surprising if nobody knows about his nomination in the first place. So what’s up with that and how can I receive notifications about upcoming elections?
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It seems that system isn’t currently sending notifications about elections to anyone. I’m the first seconder for @loujin because I happened to be spying IRC logs and noticed someone mentioning the election. Thanks for proposing him!
We really should get loujin elected. He’s one of the most active editors and making top quality edits. I have personally checked thousands of his edits. He has already made almost 300 000 edits! Loujin has also coded some useful scripts which are used by other editors.
Any auto-editors out there, please vote for loujin: https://musicbrainz.org/election/297
There’s a Discourse autoeditor forum that is intended to be used for things like this since the mailing list died, but apparently, as per @Freso on IRC:
we need someone to write a plugin for Discourse to deal with it
If anyone has the knowledge and time, please do get in touch with Freso!
In the meantime, I’ve seconded this too, because I feel loujin shouldn’t have to wait even more because of our system being messy and he definitely deserves it. But let’s see how many people actually see it 
I will personally contant every auto-editor to make this election happen. Sorry about the spam! 
(it seems system is blocking some of them because I send too many emails but at least some of them got delivered)
I know the situation sucks, but IMO @loujin’s election should be cancelled until we actually have a way of notifying autoeditors. 
I don’t expect @loujin to not get approved, but if current autoeditors do not know about the election, there’s a legitimate claim that the vote hasn’t had a fair quotum.
If anyone wants to work towards having the autoeditor election process work again, these are the relevant tickets:
https://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/OTHER-248
https://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/OTHER-254
https://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/MBS-8836
It should take only couple of minutes to get auto-editor emails from the DB and send mass-email to all of them. I have understood that Metabrainz is having some people who actually get paid for their jobs 
IMO @loujin’s election should be cancelled until we actually have a way of notifying autoeditors.
That would make it look like he really is cursed, with three cancelled elections.
And none of those jobs entail mass mailing a bunch of e-mail addresses manually. We also don’t have any Ruby coders on board. Lots of MetaBrainz operations are still very much volunteer run. We don’t have an infinite cash well (unfortunately…).
I’m pretty sure that last time he was proposed, we asked that the proposer contacted us first before re-proposing him, to make sure the technical side was updated. I don’t think we were contacted before this third proposal…
I still think we should get this fixed ASAP, but just for perspective, the mailing lists have been out of commission for longer than their replacement (the Discourse forum) has been in commission. My hope is that @opatel99 gets some time over the summer to look at this, but we’ll see.
I understood what @ListMyCDs.com said as doing an SQL query to get the email addresses of all current auto-editors, pasting those into the To: field and sending a notification mail, rather than doing it one by one. Of course that would requite more direct DB access.
In the long run, of course we’d want the process to be automated. But that doesn’t have to mean we should hold out on all auto-editor elections until those tickets are fixed. I don’t see the need to cancel the election.
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Exactly. I guess there could be some differences between email-clients but it could be as easy as copy-pasting a list of addresses.
Absolutely. There’s no rush anyway, and I don’t mind being cursed 
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@reosarevok and I had a bit of a talk just now about setting up a temporary workflow. We’ll bring our conclusion up at tomorrow’s #MetaBrainz Meeting for approval. Please let us know beforehand or at the meeting if you have any concerns/objections.
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I appreciate all the time you both have given for this! Sorry about little negativity on my earlier post.
Related to your IRC discussion: I’m totally sure some of my messages to auto-editors about the election never got delivered. If you’ll revisit my earlier message you’ll notice how I mentioned that some of them got blocked (I believe there’s a limitation related to speed). I also never sent any message to rob, seconders, bots and people who discussed on this topic. So if it’s an important factor don’t count it as “sent to everyone” because it never wasn’t. Huge majority must have gotten it. Still I’m sure that I must have closed some tabs on my browser before noticing messages about not delivering the email.
Thanks for the email. I’ve voted.
Sorry dudes, was not trying to make things difficult for anybody. 
Loujine deserves to be elected, if it can be made to work then it should be.
I appreciate all the hard work everybody does behind the scenes, it’s awesome and I love editing and being a small part of the community. Unfortunately, I do not have any programming skills or they would be offered.
Cheers,
Andrew
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There may be one more problem with the whole thing though - not showing an ending date??? [reosarevok edit: number of votes is private for everyone except proposers and seconders 
] though so that can’t be a bad thing
(Ooops almost gave it away, did not realise the voting was private - makes sense though)
The procedure @reosarevok and I thought up is now official:
@MajorLurker can you please post a link and reasoning in #musicbrainz:autoeditors? I know there’s only ~5 days left, but hey.
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Ok, think I have done what you asked . Let me know if you need me to fix/change it. Cheers for coming up with a solution