Hey Am 23.07.25 um 00:03 schrieb Tim Düsterhus:
HiAdding an "Abstain" option to RFCs was an idea that floated around multiple times in the past and it now came up again as part of (more than) one of the RFCs that recently went to vote. I've therefore finally written up a policy RFC to add such an option. As part of doing that I have also cleaned up the phrasing of the corresponding section and added some clarification of what I believe matches the current policy and just wasn't written down, particularly around "secondary votes".Please find the RFC at: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/rfc_vote_abstain And the PR at: https://github.com/php/policies/pull/20As with all policy RFCs, the corresponding PR to the policies repository will be the authoritative source of the proposal and the RFC (and discussion) will only provide extra context. Please do not comment on the PR (except for minor typographical or phrasing clarification suggestions). For comments regarding the actual "policy" reply to this discussion thread for proper visibility instead and I'll make sure to incorporate them as appropriate.This message is intended to begin the official discussion period. While it would be great to bring this policy into effect before any RFCs targeting PHP 8.6, I'll make sure to monitor the (list) activity with regard to folks being busy finalizing their own RFCs (and enjoying their summer vacations [1]) to make sure everyone had plenty of opportunity to participate in the discussion, so I would expect a vote around end of August at the earliest.
I do like the idea! But after some consideration I asked myself: Why? If I do not want to vote, I currently do not vote. Easy as that.Abstaining IMO only has a benefit to reach a certain quorum. Which to this point isn't something we have implemented in the voting process. Which is something that I was thinking about might be of interest to introduce so that RFCs require a certain amount of votes to actually have "merit" and aren't just something very esoteric that only 2 people care about.
But as we do not have that I am not sure what the benefit of an "abstain" would be - apart from seeing that person X did not accidentally but deliberately not vote.
As there is no personal liability (at least to my knowledge) of someone with Karma to actually vote I don't see the benefit.
Unless we introduce such a "liability" in terms of removing voting-karma from people that have not voted within a certain amount of time - it seems for them not to be of interest any more.
This would also allow us to reduce the amount of people with voting karma to an overseeable number - IIRC the last time we checked we had over 1000 people with voting karma but only at max 50 people or so actually voting.
Adding an Abstain in combination with one of these changes * Introducing a certain amount of minimum votes (including abstains) * Connecting voting karma to actual particiation in votes sounds very reasonable and worthwile in my opinion.Adding an abstain just so one can see that one abstained on the other hand seems to me rather pointless.
My 0.02€
Cheers
Andreas
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